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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.
Oliviero Barana, Cédric Boulbe, Sylvain Brémond, Simone Mannori, Philippe Moreau, Nathalie Ravenel, EFDA ITM Task Force contributors
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 819-824
Computational Tools, Modeling & Validation | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12487
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Plasma control is recognized to be a crucial issue for the achievement of ITER objectives. One of the most challenging tasks for the preparation of the ITER operation will therefore be the design and qualification of a variety of control algorithms. This highlights the need for a simulation platform capable of supporting the design, integration and test of advanced control algorithms on complex physics models. With this aim, a generic multi-purpose “flight” simulator (GMFS) is being developed at IRFM (Institut de Recherche sur la Fusion par confinement Magnétique), CEA Cadarache, France.The GMFS is based on Kepler, a free interdisciplinary open-source Java software. Kepler will be used as a simulation platform to test and improve control algorithms before their actual use in the real control system. The physics and engineering codes complementary to the control algorithms will be supplied by the EFDA Integrated Tokamak Modelling Task Force (ITM-TF). The GMFS will be benchmarked, at the beginning, on the Tore Supra Tokamak.In this paper we will report on a test case suitable to demonstrate the feasibility of a part of GMFS, namely the development of workflows where to create and verify ITER plasma boundary feedback control algorithms. It consists of: a) derivation of a linear plasma response model; b) design of a control diagram under the ScicosLab/Scicos open-source software; c) porting of the diagram under Kepler; d) substitution of the Kepler controller with a controller generated by a special Scicos extension; e) substitution of the simplified static linear model with the free-boundary equilibrium code CEDRES++.The test case demonstrated the feasibility of employing Kepler, ScicosLab/Scicos and other expressly-made codes in view of the conception of valuable instruments for the active control of ITER and it can be considered as a first step in this direction.
