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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.
Karl H. Spatschek
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 2 | February 2006 | Pages 67-80
Technical Paper | Plasma and Fusion Energy Physics - Kinetic Theory | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1105
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The statistical description of a hot, magnetized, and classical plasma is reviewed. The latter represents the appropriate model for a fusion plasma in magnetic confinement. Approaches for (reduced) kinetic descriptions are presented. We first briefly discuss the Landau-Fokker-Planck equation. The famous Boltzmann equation for dilute gases is then presented (without a systematic derivation), and the differences between the kinetic and the hydrodynamic regimes are worked out. In the main part, the consequences of long-range Coulomb interactions are demonstrated. Several plasma-kinetic equations, like for instance the Balescu-Lenard equation, are systematically presented. Physical consequences from the linearization of the kinetic equations, e.g., collision frequencies and Landau damping, are elucidated. In the final part of the paper the specific re-formulations in magnetized plasmas are sketched. The drift-kinetic and the gyro-kinetic approaches are presented. The paper is concluded by an outlook on often used truncations.