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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.
H. Reimerdes, R. J. Buttery, A. M. Garofalo, Y. In, R. J. La Haye, M. J. Lanctot, M. Okabayashi, J.-K. Park, M. J. Schaffer, E. J. Strait, F. A. Volpe
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 59 | Number 3 | April 2011 | Pages 572-585
Lecture | Fourth ITER International Summer School (IISS2010) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A11698
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tokamak plasmas can be sensitive to external nonaxisymmetric magnetic perturbations that are several orders of magnitude smaller than the axisymmetric field. These perturbations, which are usually undesired and are referred to as error fields, can limit operation by braking the plasma rotation until an instability such as a tearing mode, a resistive wall mode, or an error field-driven locked mode leads to an unacceptable confinement degradation or a disruption. Auxiliary heating can have two competing effects: On one hand higher leads to a degradation of the error field tolerance through plasma amplification and stronger braking, and on the other hand higher toroidal rotation can tolerate a higher magnetic braking torque. A widely used technique to detect and correct error fields is based on the characteristic density dependence of the error field tolerance in ohmic plasmas. An alternative technique is based on the measurable plasma amplification of the error field in high- plasmas. However, the detection and correction of error fields in ITER will require a modification of the present techniques in order to avoid disruptions and deal with insufficient plasma amplification of the error field at low , before the full set of auxiliary heating systems will be available. The adaptation of current techniques to address these concerns is likely, but an experimental demonstration as well as an improved physics basis is needed and remains the subject of current research.