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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.
Klaus Hesch et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 1 | January 2012 | Pages 64-69
Fusion | Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Emerging Nuclear Energy Systems | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13398
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Complementing the efforts towards the realization of ITER, KIT is pursuing, within the overall EURATOM fusion program, a number of important long-term technology developments towards a magnetic confinement fusion power plant (FPP), taking into account the features that will distinguish such facility from ITER.To this end, structural materials on the basis of both low-activation steels and refractory metals, as well as concepts for breeding blankets and divertor designs, are being developed along with suitable manufacturing and joining technologies. In parallel, KIT contributes to the engineering design and validation phase of the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility (IFMIF) necessary for qualifying the materials to be used in an FPP. The specific characteristics of an FPP fuel cycle, i.e., substantial tritium quantities within huge mass flows of gases and the related tritium compatible high throughput vacuum and pumping technologies, are being translated into viable engineering approaches. High temperature superconducting magnet solutions are being developed, with a view to overall plant efficiency. In order to increase the wall-plug efficiency of plasma heating, advanced gyrotron tubes with power levels significantly beyond what is envisaged for ITER are being developed along with a frequency tunability option for efficiently counteracting plasma instabilities.
