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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.
Yasuji Kozaki
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 3 | April 2006 | Pages 542-552
Technical Paper | Fast Ignition | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1166
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We have analyzed the design windows for laser fusion power plants based on direct-drive fast ignition concepts and have examined the issues of chamber technologies and the feasibility of a small laser fusion experimental reactor suitable for developing their power plants. Target gain curves are assessed for power plants having 90- to 200-MJ fusion yields with 600-kJ to 1-MJ lasers, and for an experimental reactor [the laser fusion experimental reactor (LFER)], having a 10-MJ fusion yield with a 200-kJ laser, i.e., 100 kJ for implosion and 100 kJ for heating. The fast ignition LFER can produce its fusion output approximately one order of magnitude smaller than that of the central ignition design, so that we can use a rather small solid-wall chamber for the first stage of the LFER operation. We can also expect to decrease laser cost drastically, although for the heating laser we must develop a long-life final optics system. Using fast ignition direct-drive targets, we could design a smaller ~300-MW(electric) reactor, with 200-MJ fusion pulse energy and 4-Hz repetition rates. The smaller pulse energies mitigate pulse loads on the chamber walls and the final optics; then, we can flexibly design large 1200-MW(electric) modular plants by using multiple reactor modules. We identified the issues of liquid-wall and solid-wall chambers and proposed basic reactor concepts for a power plant (KOYO-Fast) and an experimental reactor using fast ignition direct-drive cone targets.