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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.
Guido Van Oost
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 2 | February 2006 | Pages 357-366
Technical Paper | Plasma and Fusion Energy Physics - Diagnostics | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1135
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
During the last decade it became increasingly clear that boundary plasmas play a major role in magnetic fusion experiments, and strongly relate to and even dominate central plasma processes. On the one hand, the conditions of the boundary plasma are crucial to obtain high fusion triple products; on the other hand, plasma-surface interactions, a sufficiently low impurity concentration in the fusion volume, heat removal and helium exhaust which directly relate to the boundary plasma, have emerged as equally important goals, and even more difficult to reach in the state of self-sustained thermonuclear burn. Successful resolution of these issues is critical to establish the viability of the tokamak confinement concept as a fusion power reactor.