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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.
P. Meekunnasombat, J. G. Oakley, M. H. Anderson, R. Bonazza
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 4 | May 2005 | Pages 1170-1174
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Inertial Fusion Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A845
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A large, vertical shock tube is used to explore the breakup and mitigation effects of liquid layers expected from the hydrodynamic shock generated in an inertial fusion reaction. Single and multiple layers of water are tested at two Mach numbers, 2.12 and 3.20. X-ray radiography techniques are used to image the breakup of the water layer resulting in a quantitative measure of the mass fraction distribution of water after shock impact. The amount of breakup is increased with the addition of multiple layers and the increased breakup decreases the end wall impulse. The speed of the transmitted shock wave can be reduced by 50% and is a weak function of the number of layers. The peak pressure at the end-wall of the shock tube is significantly increased due to the high impulsive force of the single liquid layer, however this pressure is substantially reduced when multiple layers containing the same mass of water are used.