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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.
J. T. Scoville
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 3 | October 2007 | Pages 398-403
Technical Paper | The Technology of Fusion Energy - Experimental Devices and Advanced Designs | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1520
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Until the recent experimental campaign in 2006, all the neutral beam systems on the DIII-D tokamak injected power with the momentum in the same direction as the usual plasma current ("co-injection"). A major modification made during the April 2005-March 2006 shutdown period rotated one of the two-source beamlines to allow injecting power with the momentum opposite that of the plasma current ("counter-injection"). This modification provides the capability of injecting up to 10 MW of neutral beam power with zero net momentum input to the plasma. Decoupling the injected momentum and power opens a previously inaccessible parameter space for experiments that study the effect of rotation on various plasma instabilities, transport, and operational scenarios.Rotating the 5 MW neutral beamline presented significant technical challenges. The beamline and several major subsystems required extensive dismantling and rebuilding, and a careful alignment of the ion sources was required to document the new injection paths. We present a summary of the tasks required for the beamline rotation, describe major technical issues addressed, and discuss the advantages of the new configuration.