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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.
S. Masuzaki, T. Morisaki, M. Shoji, Y. Kubota, T. Watanabe, M. Kobayashi, J. Miyazawa, M. Goto, S. Morita, B. J. Peterson, N. Ohyabu, A. Komori, O. Motojima, LHD Experimental Group, H. Ogawa
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 3 | October 2006 | Pages 361-371
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1257
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the characteristics of the heliotron-type magnetic configuration is that it has an intrinsic divertor structure (helical divertor). Particle control using a helical divertor configuration, to achieve improved confinement and sustainment of steady-state high-performance plasmas, is a major experimental goal in the Large Helical Device (LHD), the largest heliotron-type superconducting device, and it needs to be demonstrated on the route to the design of the heliotron-type fusion reactor. The LHD scrape-off layer (SOL) in the intrinsic helical divertor configuration has a unique magnetic field line structure consisting of stochastic regions, residual islands, whisker structures, and laminar layers contrasting with the "onion-skin"-like magnetic field line structure in poloidal divertor tokamak SOLs. Since the first experimental campaign in LHD in 1998, studies aiming at understanding the edge plasma properties in the "open" helical divertor configurations have been conducted experimentally and theoretically. In this paper, the helical divertor studies in the LHD are reviewed, and the future experimental plan is shown.
