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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.
R. L. Boivin, J. L. Luxon, M. E. Austin, N. H. Brooks, K. H. Burrell, E. J. Doyle, M. E. Fenstermacher, D. S. Gray, M. Groth, C.-L. Hsieh, R. J. Jayakumar, G. R. McKee, C. J. Lasnier, A. W. Leonard, R. A. Moyer, T. L. Rhodes, J. C. Rost, D. L. Rudakov, M. J. Schaffer, E. J. Strait, D. M. Thomas, M. Van Zeeland, J. G. Watkins, G. W. Watson, W. P. West, C. P. C. Wong
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 2 | October 2005 | Pages 834-851
Technical Paper | DIII-D Tokamak | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A1043
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The DIII-D tokamak, located at General Atomics in San Diego, California, has long been recognized as being one of the best diagnosed magnetic fusion experiments. Composed of more than 50 individual systems, the diagnostic set takes advantage of a high number of large-aperture access ports. These instruments are used in support of basic control of the tokamak and experiments in the transport, stability, boundary and heating, and current drive science areas. These systems have contributed to the success of the Advanced Tokamak program, in addition to the many contributions to our physics understanding and real-time control of fusion-relevant plasmas. Numerous novel techniques have been developed, tested, and fielded on DIII-D including new approaches required for a burning plasma experiment. Details of the diagnostic systems will be described along with some illustrative recent results.
