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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
F. Castejón, J. M. Reynolds, J. M. Fontdecaba, R. Balbín, J. Guasp, D. López-Bruna, I. Campos, L. A. Fernández, D. Fernández-Fraile, V. Martín-Mayor, A. Tarancón
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 3 | October 2006 | Pages 412-418
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1263
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
It was observed previously that the ion temperature profile of low-density electron cyclotron resonance-heated TJ-II plasmas is almost flat and that energetic ions are present well outside the last closed magnetic surface. The heat diffusivity obtained for such ion temperature profiles is very high, and therefore, transport cannot be described by Fick's law. In this work, ion trajectories with different pitches and starting points have been calculated for the relevant magnetic configuration. It is found that a feasible explanation for such a flat mean energy profile is that ion orbits are wide enough to communicate distant parts of the plasma radius, thus giving an effective flat ion temperature profile, for these low-density (<1019-m-3) plasmas. The distribution function is also obtained without considering collisions; thus, non-Maxwellian features are found. The final particle density shows inhomogeneities on a magnetic surface.
