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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.
L. L. Snead, K. J. Leonard, G. E. Jellison, Jr., Mohamed Sawan, Tom Lehecka
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 1069-1077
Fusion Materials | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-26
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Dielectric mirrors have been considered for both magnetic and inertial confinement systems. Such mirrors are comprised of multiple thin bi-layers of high and low refractive index materials deposited onto a substrate. Three dielectric mirror types were fabricated to reflect at the KrF laser wavelength of 248 nm and these mirrors irradiated at ∼ 175 °C in the dose range of 0.001 to 0.1 x 1025 n/m2 (E>0.1 MeV.) Mirror reflectivity was measured on as-irradiated and on 300 and 400 °C vacuum annealed mirrors. The best performing mirror overall, the alumina/silica multilayer mirror, did not appear to have degraded reflectivity in the as-irradiated or the as-irradiated and annealed conditions. For the highest dose, annealed condition degradation was observed in the hafnia silica mirror. Additionally, laser induced damage threshold was measured on the best performing mirror (the alumina/silica mirror) with a resulting threshold of > 1 J/cm2, For this mirror, the damage threshold was not discernibly degraded by neutron irradiation. These findings are somewhat in contradiction to earlier work, which suggested poor performance of dielectric mirrors at an order of magnitude lower neutron dose. In conclusion, the current findings, while preliminary, suggest the possibility for using dielectric mirrors to much higher dose levels.
