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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.
Massimo Zucchetti
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 786-790
Safety & Environment | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12481
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a Deuterium-Tritium fusion reactor, nearly 20% of the thermal power has to be transferred from the hot plasma through the wall components of the burn chamber. Design requirements of commercial fusion power plant in-vessel components are potentially even more stringent than those of experimental devices. Fusion nuclear reactor studies are currently devoted mostly to the Deuterium-Tritium (DT) fuel cycle, since it is the easiest way to reach ignition or a high energy gain. However, reducing the activation of materials is one of the biggest concerns for fusion power: the study of advanced fuel fusion devices, such as the CANDOR Deuterium-Helium-3 (DHe3) tokamak, is proposed for this purpose. The plasma confinement requirements for a DHe3 reactor are much more challenging than those for a DT reactor. Thus, the demands on the divertor and the first wall are more severe, particularly during a disruption. Safety analyses, starting from heat load determinations, have been performed for CANDOR, a proposed DHe3 experiment, starting from similar evaluations carried out for the ARIES III DHe3 reactor.