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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
Sungwoo Kim, Suk-Ho Hong, Kwang Pyo Kim, Dong Su Lee, Woong Chae Kim, Kap-Rae Park
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 98-101
doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12413
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The major impurity among gas species in the 2009 KSTAR campaign is water, up to 6.91 % of total pressure in the vacuum vessel. Various wall conditioning methods such as GDC, ICWC, and boronization are conducted to reduce water impurity which affects the plasma initiation. GDCs reduce water pressure to 1 × 10-9 mbar while several minutes of inter-shot ICWCs suppress water pressure around 3 × 10-9 mbar. Compared with the results from the KSTAR boronization, routinely performed inter-shot ICWCs would have similar effect as boronization for water removal from the vacuum vessel.
