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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. Kodama, P. A. Norreys, Y. Sentoku, R. B. Campbell
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 3 | April 2006 | Pages 316-326
Technical Paper | Fast Ignition | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1151
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A reentrant cone concept for efficient heating of high-density plasmas has been studied as an advanced fast ignition scheme. The roles of the reentrant cone, as indicated by particle-in-cell (PIC) code simulations and confirmed by basic experiments, are reviewed, particularly the efficient collection and guidance of the laser light into the cone tip and the direction of the energetic electrons into the high-density region. It has been shown that the energetic electrons converge to the tip of the cone as a result of the surface electron flow guided by self-generated quasi-static magnetic fields and electrostatic sheath fields. As a result, the energetic electron density at the tip is locally greater than the case of using an open geometry such as a normal flat foil target. Using these advantageous properties of the reentrant cone, efficient fast heating of imploded high-density plasmas has been demonstrated in integrated fast ignition experiments. A hybrid PIC code (LSP) has been used to understand the relativistic electron beam thermalization and subsequent heating of highly compressed plasmas. The simulation results are in reasonable agreement with the integrated experiments. Anomalous stopping appears to be present and is created by the growth and saturation of an electromagnetic filamentation mode that generates a strong back-electromagnetic force impeding energetic electrons.
