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Latest News
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.
Seungyon Cho et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 216-220
Tritium, Safety, and Environment | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8905
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Helium Cooled Solid Breeder (HCSB) blanket is one of two blanket concepts being considered as Korean Test Blanket Module (TBM) for ITER with the aim for testing and verifying the capability of the breeding blanket concepts. R&D activities being carrying out for HCSB TBM include the development of materials, fabrication technologies, and TBM associated system design. A small sample of ferritic/martensitic (FM) steel was fabricated. It was found that the tensile strength was close to previous value. A fabrication technique of sphere pebbles of lithium titanate breeder and graphite reflector was developed. A FM/FM TIG welding was performed and the results showed that tensile strength of the welded zone was decreased about 10 %. A small punch test method of mechanical property evaluation was introduced to verify the suitability of small specimen for irradiation test by examining the relationship of the conventional uniaxial tensile test, and the tensile strengths were compared. As TBM design has complicated square channel configuration, short square channel was fabricated successfully. Finally, the components and specifications of the TBM associated systems are described in this paper.
