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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.
T. Mizuuchi, F. Sano, K. Nagasaki, H. Okada, S. Kobayashi, K. Hanatani, Y. Torii, Y. Ijiri, T. Senju, K. Yaguchi, K. Sakamoto, K. Toshi, M. Shibano, K. Kondo, Y. Nakamura, M. Kaneko, H. Arimoto, G. Motojima, S. Fujikawa, H. Kitagawa, H. Nakamura, T. Tsuji, M. Uno, S. Watanabe, H. Yabutani, S. Matsuoka, M. Nosaku, N. Watanabe, S. Yamamoto, K. Y. Watanabe, Y. Suzuki, M. Yokoyama
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 3 | October 2006 | Pages 352-360
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1256
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the helical-axis heliotron configuration, bumpiness of the Fourier components in Boozer coordinates is introduced to control the neoclassical transport. The bumpiness helps not only to align the mod-Bmin contours with the magnetic flux surfaces but also to control the balance of bootstrap currents due to helical and toroidal ripples. Effects of bumpiness control on the plasma performance (noninductive currents, fast-ion behavior, and global energy confinement) have been investigated in Heliotron J by selecting three configurations with different bumpiness ([curly epsilon]b = B04/B00 = 0.01, 0.06, and 0.15 at = 2/3) but almost the same edge rotational transform and plasma volume. The dependence of noninductive toroidal currents is qualitatively consistent with the neoclassical prediction for the bootstrap current. The high-bumpiness configuration seems to be preferable for the confinement of fast ions. However, the longer global energy confinement time is not observed in the highest-bumpiness configuration ([curly epsilon]b = 0.15). When the dependence of the effective ripple modulation amplitude in International Stellarator Scaling 04 scaling is examined, the experimental results show that the normalized global energy confinement time seems long in the configuration with the minimum effective ripple modulation amplitude, where [curly epsilon]b is 0.06.
