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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.
Enrico Lucon
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 289-294
Fusion Materials | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8916
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Within the European Fusion Development Agreement (EFDA) Long Term Programme activities on Material Research, several versions of EUROFER ODS (Oxide-Dispersion Strengthened) have been produced and characterized. The most promising ones to date are the so-called "2nd generation" ODS (HIPped, hot rolled and thermomechanically treated) and the "EU batch" (produced by Plansee in the form of hot rolled plates and extruded bars). These two materials have been mechanically characterized in the unirradiated condition at SCKCEN in collaboration with other European institutes by means of tensile, impact and fracture toughness tests. The same characterization has been performed at SCKCEN on the two materials after low dose irradiation at 300°C in the BR2 test reactor (1.5-1.7 dpa). The results are compared with available data from early versions of EUROFER ODS and conventional (i.e. non-ODS) EUROFER, unirradiated and irradiated under similar conditions. It is confirmed that even the most advanced ODS steels show higher tensile strength than the base material, but also significantly worse fracture toughness properties. On the other hand, the "EU batch" irradiated to 1.52 dpa shows comparatively limited irradiation sensitivity.
