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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.
M. Lipa, J. Schlosser, F. Escourbiac
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 3 | October 2009 | Pages 1124-1149
Technical Papers | Tore Supra Special Issue | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A9171
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To fulfill the Tore Supra mission (the realization and study of high-performance long-duration discharges), the development of reliable actively cooled plasma-facing components is mandatory. This was foreseen from the beginning of Tore Supra, and since 1985, the Tore Supra team has been involved in the development and fabrication of actively cooled plasma-facing components. The initial configuration of the machine in 1988 included a 12 m2 inner first wall made of stainless steel tubes armoured with brazed graphite, outer water-cooled stainless steel panels, and modular pump limiters. This configuration, using the inner wall as limiter, allowed 20- to 30-s-duration plasma discharges to be performed. Further progress required the development of a more reliable brazing technique and a limiter support system mechanically independent of the vacuum vessel. A new configuration (Composants Internes et Limiteur project), using a completely new concept of high-heat-flux components (including notably a braze-free bond between carbon-fiber composite tiles and copper heat sink), was therefore launched in 1997. With this new configuration, discharges up to 6 min with 1 GJ of injected and removed power were achieved in 2003.
