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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.
Daigo Tsuru et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 875-882
Test Blanket Modules | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A9021
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Development of Water Cooled Solid Breeder (WCSB) TBM, the primary candidate of ITER Test Blanket Module (TBM), has been performed in Japan, according to the TBM milestones, which are necessary for acceptance of the TBM in ITER for testing from the first day of plasma operation. The TBM milestones consist of milestones on safety assessment, module qualification and design integration in ITER. For the safety milestones, essential source terms were evaluated, and failure modes and effect analysis (FMEA) was performed. Based on the results of FMEA, safety assessment was performed. For the milestones of the design integration, detailed structural design of the TBM and the interface structure with the ITER test port were performed. Based on the design, performance analysis such as thermo-mechanical analysis in over-pressurization was performed. For the milestones of the qualification of fabrication technology, essential fabrication technology was developed and near full size first wall of the TBM was successfully fabricated and demonstration of the integrity in heat flux equivalent to ITER. The development of the WCSB TBM is showing steady progress toward the installation in ITER.