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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.
W. W. Heidbrink
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 2 | October 2005 | Pages 945-953
Technical Paper | DIII-D Tokamak - Achieving Reactor-Level Plasma Pressure | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A1050
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A summary of fast ion experiments in the DIII-D tokamak is given. Most of the experiments involve ~80-keV deuterium beam ions. Deceleration of dilute fast-ion populations is accurately described by coulomb scattering theory. Fast waves with frequencies several times the deuterium cyclotron frequency interact with beam ions when the product of wave number and gyroradius k[perpendicular]i is [greater than or approximately equal to]1.4. Global confinement of fast ions is often excellent although sawteeth, tearing modes, and beam-driven instabilities can cause additional transport. Intense beam-ion populations often drive instabilities. Toroidicity-induced Alfvén eigenmodes (TAE) and somewhat lower frequency modes (originally called beta-induced Alfvén eigenmodes) are often observed in a wide variety of plasma conditions. Over 50% of the beam power is lost during strong activity. Damping mechanisms such as mode coupling or radiative damping are needed to explain the observed TAE stability threshold. The most unstable toroidal mode number agrees well with theoretical expectations, but the radial and poloidal structure of the mode and the observed beam-ion transport have not been adequately explained. The modes with frequencies below the TAE are probably two types of energetic particle modes: the resonant TAE and the resonant kinetic ballooning mode.