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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.
A. Komori, T. Morisaki, T. Mutoh, S. Sakakibara, Y. Takeiri, R. Kumazawa, S. Kubo, K. Ida, S. Morita, K. Narihara, T. Shimozuma, K. Tanaka, K. Y. Watanabe, H. Yamada, M. Yoshinuma, T. Akiyama, N. Ashikawa, M. Emoto, H. Funaba, M. Goto, T. Ido, K. Ikeda, S. Inagaki, M. Isobe, H. Igami, K. Itoh, O. Kaneko, K. Kawahata, T. Kobuchi, S. Masuzaki, K. Matsuoka, T. Minami, J. Miyazawa, S. Muto, Y. Nagayama, Y. Nakamura, H. Nakanishi, Y. Narushima, K. Nishimura, M. Nishiura, A. Nishizawa, N. Noda, S. Ohdachi, Y. Oka, M. Osakabe, N. Ohyabu, T. Ozaki, B. J. Peterson, A. Sagara, K. Saito, R. Sakamoto, K. Sato, M. Sato, T. Seki, M. Shoji, S. Sudo, N. Tamura, K. Toi, T. Tokuzawa, K. Tsumori, T. Uda, T. Watari, I. Yamada, M. Yokoyama, Y. Yoshimura, O. Motojima, LHD Experimental Group, C. D. Beidler, T. Fujita, A. Isayama, Y. Sakamoto, H. Takenaga, P. Goncharov, K. Ishii, M. Sakamoto, S. Murakami, T. Notake, N. Takeuchi, S. Okajima, M. Sasao
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 2 | August 2006 | Pages 136-145
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1229
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Remarkable progress to access the reactor-relevant regime has been made in a recent experiment in the Large Helical Device. Optimizing the rotational transform, the average beta value of 4.3%, which is the highest record among helical devices, was achieved. The high-performance plasma with a fusion triple product up to ~2.2 × 1019 m-3keVs was sustained for >7 s by repetitive hydrogen pellet injection. With regard to steady-state operation, which is one of the key issues to realize a fusion reactor, discharges for >30 min were successfully sustained by ion cyclotron range of frequency heating with the aid of the magnetic axis swing technique to reduce the heat load to the plasma-facing component. In the discharge, the total input energy to the plasma reached 1.3 GJ, which also established a new record.
