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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.
A. M. Garofalo
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 2 | October 2005 | Pages 918-930
Technical Paper | DIII-D Tokamak - Achieving Reactor-Level Plasma Pressure | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A1048
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The effort to understand the physics of the resistive wall mode (RWM) and develop methods to control this magnetohydrodynamic mode to allow achievement of higher pressure in advanced tokamak plasmas has been an example of successful multi-institutional collaboration at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego, California. DIII-D research in this area has produced several advances and breakthroughs following a coordinated research plan involving a sequence of measurements, development of new analysis tools, and the installation of new diagnostic and feedback stabilization hardware: Suppression of the RWM by active magnetic feedback has been demonstrated using the DIII-D six-element error field correction coil, rotational stabilization of the RWM has been demonstrated and sustained for all values of the plasma pressure from the no-wall to the ideal-wall stability limits, improved RWM feedback stabilization has been shown using a new set of 12 internal control coils, and newly developed models of feedback have shown good agreement with the measurements. By so doing, the DIII-D work on RWM stabilization has become a cornerstone of the long-term advanced tokamak program and is having impact on the world fusion program. Presently both ITER and FIRE are including plans for RWM stabilization in their programs.
