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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. Sakakibara, H. Yamada, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 471-481
Chapter 8. Diagnostics | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10833
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper describes present status of magnetic measurements in the Large Helical Device (LHD). The magnetic measurements have been mainly applied for estimation of global parameters and for magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) study rather than the equilibrium control because of net current-free plasmas. The techniques of diamagnetic flux measurement and MHD mode analysis are introduced. The estimation of the diamagnetic flux strongly depends on the plasma currents inducing an eddy current on continuous helical coils. The obtained diamagnetic energy is almost consistent with kinetic energy within the measurement error. The MHD modes have been identified through comparison of magnetic probe signals with virtual perturbation generated by multifilament currents on Boozer coordinates based on three-dimensional MHD equilibria. The validity of this technique was considered through the pressure gradient control experiments.