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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
Lane Carlson, Mark Tillack, Jeremy Stromsoe, Neil Alexander, Dan Goodin, Ronald Petzoldt
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 409-416
IFE Target Design | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8936
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the High Average Power Laser (HAPL) program, we have developed an integrated target tracking and engagement system designed to track an inertial fusion energy target traveling 50-100m/s in three dimensions and to steer laser driver beams so as to engage it with ±20 m accuracy from a stand off distance of ~20 meters. The system consists of separate axial and transverse detection techniques to pre-steer individual beamlet mirrors, and a final fine-correction technique using a short-pulse "glint" laser to interrogate the target's position 1-2 ms before the target reaches chamber center.We are working to demonstrate the viability of this concept by conducting a table top engagement demonstration at reduced speeds and distances. Integration of the various components has been completed and hit-on-the-fly experiments are now being conducted. Initial engagement efforts from a simulated driver beam overfilling a falling target yielded a 150-m standard deviation for targets placed ±1.5mm from chamber center. Since then, our efforts have focused on systematically defining and eliminating all sources of error in each component and subsystem. Current engagement accuracy is 42m RMS. The engagement effort and the step-wise improvements realized are reported, as well as the path toward our goal.