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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.
Steve Ployhar et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 1 | January 2012 | Pages 107-112
Fusion | Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Emerging Nuclear Energy Systems | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13405
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
ITER is an international fusion facility being built in France to demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion power. Fusion power at ITER is generated using a Tokamak machine in which burning plasma at temperatures of 150,000,000°C is confined within a vacuum vessel by magnetic fields. The enormous amount of heat generated by the Tokamak and its auxiliary systems is removed by the cooling water systems, consisting of the Tokamak Cooling Water System (TCWS), the Component Cooling Water System (CCWS), the Chilled Water System (CHWS), and the Heat Rejection System (HRS). These systems are designed to remove an initial peak heat load of about 1100MW.ITER is an experimental facility that will operate in a cyclical fashion. High levels of fusion power will be generated during repeated plasma pulses with specified durations. Heat produced by the fusion reaction will not be used to generate electricity, but will be rejected to the environment.The cyclical nature of the ITER machine presents distinct challenges to the design of the HRS which must reject normal facility heat loads plus large, intermittent heat loads from Tokamak pulse operations, while maintaining stable and predictable cooling tower basin water temperatures to meet the needs of cooling water system clients. This paper explores these challenges to the HRS design and describes the selected solutions.
