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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
K. Okano, K. Tobita, Y. Ogawa, R. Hiwatari
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 1 | January 2012 | Pages 28-32
Plenary | Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Emerging Nuclear Energy Systems | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13392
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A report in 2005 by the Atomic Energy Commission of Japan has stated an expectation to secure the prospect of putting fusion into practical use by the middle of 21st century. A roadmap based on this policy was developed in 2008. The roadmap consists of a breakdown list of works which has shown and categorized the R&D issues required to construct the DEMO plants. Two tokamak DEMO concepts, SlimCS (Rp=5.5m) and Demo-CREST (Rp=7.3m), have been proposed in Japan as possible DEMO designs which will fit in the policy.
