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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.
George H. Miley, Bradley Boyer
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 1 | January 2012 | Pages 200-205
Fusion-Fission Hybrids and Transmutation | Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Emerging Nuclear Energy Systems | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13420
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recent progress in fusion development combined with the rebirth of nuclear fission power has regenerated interest in fusion-fission hybrid reactors. Such systems could be applied to both low power research reactors for use in University and industrial research assemblies and power reactors. However most attention has been directed at D-T fusion drivers using Tokamak, ICF or various alternate confinement systems like FRCs. However, the necessity to have large devices and breed tritium in the blanket complicates the concept. Here we propose the inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion approach since it offers the advantages of simple structural, high power density and a non-Maxwellian beam dominated plasma suited for burning advanced fuels to minimize tritium involvement. The cylindrical IEC allows a small compact unit which can be inserted into fuel element slots in the fission reactor core, thus providing a compact overall system and excellent neutronic coupling. The basic physics for the IEC has been demonstrated in small-scale laboratory experiments close to levels needed for driving a subcritical assembly for use in student teaching labs. However, for use in future high power hybrids significant scale-up in source strength is required. Scale up using an external ion source (e.g. a Helicon) so the background gas pressure is minimized in the reaction zone potentially offers a route to the required neutron source strength.