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From operator to entrepreneur: David Garcia applies outage management lessons
David Garcia
If ComEd’s Zion plant in northern Illinois hadn’t closed in 1998, David Garcia might still be there, where he got his start in nuclear power as an operator at age 24.
But in his ninth year working there, Zion closed, and Garcia moved on to a series of new roles—including at Wisconsin’s Point Beach plant, the corporate offices of Minnesota’s Xcel Energy, and on the supplier side at PaR Nuclear—into an on-the-job education that he augmented with degrees in business and divinity that he sought later in life.
Garcia started his own company—Waymaker Resource Group—in 2014. Recently, Waymaker has been supporting Holtec’s restart project at the Palisades plant with staffing and analysis. Palisades sits almost exactly due east of the fully decommissioned Zion site on the other side of Lake Michigan and is poised to operate again after what amounts to an extended outage of more than three years. Holtec also plans to build more reactors at the same site.
For Garcia, the takeaway is clear: “This industry is not going away. Nuclear power and the adjacent industries that support nuclear power—and clean energy, period—are going to be needed for decades upon decades.”
In July, Garcia talked with Nuclear News staff writer Susan Gallier about his career and what he has learned about running successful outages and other projects.
B. A. Vermillion et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 4 | May 2005 | Pages 1139-1142
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Inertial Fusion Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A839
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We are performing research and development to increase production quantity and yield for Inertial Fusion Energy targets for laser fusion. A key component of the laser fusion target is an approximately 4 mm diameter foam shell. To facilitate large-scale production, research into optimization of foam shell gelation and hardening times to reduce non-concentricity of the foam shell is underway. Additionally, we are examining methods to modify the current laboratory bench scale process for initial foam shell formation, various fluid exchanges, and sealcoat chemistry into a continuous process in collaboration with Schafer Corporation. The proposed process utilizes porous tubing sections to perform fluid exchanges in a long (200 m-1 km) continuous path of tubing extending from the triple orifice generator currently used to encapsulate and form the foam shell.Real-time process control has been applied to the triple orifice generator to control the diameter of the foam shell. The system makes use of a pair of photodiode sensors in a closed loop feedback control system incorporating a variable speed process pump. Empirical results indicate the process control loop is capable of identifying wet shell diameters to an approximate standard deviation of 80 to 90 m, on par with characterization results indicating true shell diameter standard deviations of 30-80 m.