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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
C. Neumeyer et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 95-99
ITER Systems | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12333
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The ITER project is considering the inclusion of two sets of in-vessel coils, one to mitigate the effect of Edge Localized Modes (ELMs) and another to provide vertical stabilization (VS). The in-vessel location (behind the blanket shield modules, mounted to the vacuum vessel inner wall) presents special challenges in terms of nuclear radiation (~3000 MGy) and temperature (100 °C vessel during operations, 200 °C during bakeout). Mineral insulated conductors are well suited to this environment but are not commercially available in the large cross section required. An R&D program is underway to demonstrate the production of mineral insulated (MgO or Spinel) hollow copper conductor with stainless steel jacketing needed for these coils. A preliminary design based on this conductor technology has been developed and is presented herein.
