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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.
John Slough
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 464-469
Power Plant, Demo, and FNSF | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST60-464
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An intense neutron source capable of generating the characteristic flux of a fusion reactor (1-4 MW/m2) is an essential element for adequate reactor materials assessment. Based on recent experimental results involving the magneto-kinetic compression of the Field Reversed Configuration (FRC), it is believed that such a fusion based neutron source can be rapidly developed at low cost. The ability to provide a fusion plasma with the necessary radiation intensity is afforded by the considerable increase in fusion neutron yield that occurs concurrently with the large reduction in reacting plasma volume from the straightforward magnetic flux compression of an FRC plasmoid. Pulsed formation and flux compression of FRCs in a prototype device operating at 4 Hz would yield a neutron power fluence at the wall of 1 MW/m2 from a fusion plasma volume of a half liter. This is roughly a factor 106 smaller than a reactor-scale fusion plasma such as ITER, thereby dramatically reducing the cost and time for the evaluation of materials for fusion application. The required magnetic compression field and energy per pulse is less than 16 T and 100 kJ respectively.
