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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.
A. L. Wehmeyer, R. F. Radel, G. L. Kulcinski
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 4 | May 2005 | Pages 1260-1264
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Nonelectric Applications | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A861
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Detection of explosives has been identified as a near term commercial opportunity for using a fusion plasma. Typical explosive compositions contain low Z material (C, N, O) which are not easily detected using conventional x-rays or metal detectors. However, 2.45 MeV neutrons produced in a D-D fusion reaction can be used for detection of explosives or other clandestine materials in suitcases, packages, or shipping containers.Steady-state D-D operation is possible using an Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (IEC) fusion device. The University of Wisconsin IEC device has produced D-D neutrons at 1.8 × 108 neutrons/second at a true cathode voltage of 166 kV and a meter current of 68 mA. These neutron production rates are approaching the levels required for the detection of explosives. In order to increase and optimize the neutron production rate in the IEC device, experiments were performed altering the cathode's size (diameter), geometry, and material composition. Preliminary results indicate that significant differences in neutron production rates are not achieved by altering the geometry or material composition of the cathode. However, the neutron production rate was found to increase approximately 20% by doubling the cathode's diameter from 10 cm to 20 cm. In addition, increasing the cathode voltage from 34 kV to 94 kV at a meter current of 30 mA increased the neutron production rate from 1.24 × 106 n/s to 2.83 × 107 n/s.
