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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Latest News
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.
L. Esteban, M. Sánchez, J. Sánchez, P. Kornejew, M. Hirsch, J. A. López, A. Fernández, O. Nieto-Taladriz
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 3 | November 2010 | Pages 771-777
Selected Paper from Sixth Fusion Data Validation Workshop 2010 (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-9
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Interferometry is used for measuring line average electronic densities in fusion plasmas. The W7-X stellarator will employ a two-color CO2 (10.591 m) and CO (5.295 m) heterodyne-infrared interferometer as an electronic density measurement diagnostic. The frequency displacement is 40 MHz for the CO2 wavelength and 25 MHz for the CO, so these values will fix the heterodyne frequencies. Because the frequency gap between the two carriers is wide enough and the detector sensitivity is similar for both wavelengths, it is possible to use a single detector for the two signals; nevertheless, they should be split with filters. Traditionally, the intermediate-frequency signals should be filtered, downconverted to a lower frequency by the use of analog circuitry, and then processed. A new approach is proposed. The intermediate-frequency signals are directly sampled by means of high-speed analog-to-digital converters followed by a digital diplexer and a specific phase-meter processor implemented in a field-programmable gate array. Preliminary results from the W7-X infrared interferometer prototype, without plasma, are presented.
