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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.
S. Morita, M. Goto, S. Muto, H. Y. Zhou, C. F. Dong, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 91-102
Chapter 3. Confinement and Transport | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10796
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Impurity transport has been studied in the Large Helical Device (LHD) with different diagnostic approaches based on an active method that combine carbon pellet injection with visible bremsstrahlung measurement and three passive methods for radial profile measurements of Ar and Fe K X-ray lines, Zeff, and extreme ultraviolet (EUV, 500 Å) impurity line emissions, in addition to usual passive spectroscopy. The existence of an inward convective velocity is confirmed in the edge region ( > 0.6) using the active method, whereas no convection is required in the core region ( < 0.6). The electron density dependence is weak for the diffusion coefficient (typically D = 0.15 to 0.25 m2 /s) for densities of 1 to 5 × 1013 cm-3 but is strong for the inward convective velocity, which varies in the range of V(a) = -0.2 to -1.5 m/s. The inward V in helium plasmas (-0.4 m/s at = 0.8 and the central density, ne [approximately] 4.0 × 1013 cm-3) is nearly half that in hydrogen plasmas (-0.7 m/s). This difference suggests a charge state dependence of fuel ions predicted by the neoclassical theory. Radial profiles of impurity transport coefficients of argon and iron have been studied using spatially resolved soft X-ray pulse-height analyzers. The impurity transport has also been studied in extremely high density discharges achieved by H2 pellet injection based on the passive spectroscopy and Zeff profile measurement. A flat Zeff profile is obtained at ne = 2.5 × 1014 cm-3 with values of 1.1 Zeff 1.2, suggesting no existence of impurity accumulation and radially constant impurity partial pressure. Finally, radial profiles of impurity lines in the EUV range are analyzed with the transport coefficients.