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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.
R. Keppens, J. W. S. Blokland
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 2 | February 2006 | Pages 131-138
Technical Paper | Plasma and Fusion Energy Physics - Equilibrium and Instabilities | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1112
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nuclear fusion research promises to harvest the excess energy carried by energetic neutrons when Deuterium and Tritium hydrogen isotopes are fused together to form -particles. Pressure and density conditions needed for these fusion reactions ensure that these charged constituents, together with the free electrons, form a fully ionized plasma at temperatures of about 100 million Kelvin. Any contact with material walls would instantaneously cool the plasma and must be avoided. In the axisymmetric toroidal vessel of a tokamak, a hot plasma is confined primarily by magnetic Lorentz forces. Strong helical magnetic fields that trace out nested toroidal surfaces help to thermally insulate the plasma from the walls and support it against its own pressure gradient. To lowest order, a fluid model of the equilibrium considers only this force balance in the poloidal cross-section of the tokamak, as expressed analytically by the Grad-Shafranov equation.