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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.
R. Piovan, L. Novello, A. De Lorenzi, E. Gaio, F. Milani
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 3 | October 2007 | Pages 403-407
Technical Paper | The Technology of Fusion Energy - Experimental Devices and Advanced Designs | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1521
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A test facility for a full-scale prototype of the Neutral Beam Injector (NBI) for ITER is planned to be built in Padova, Italy, in the framework of the European activities in support of ITER. Two possible sites were considered: the site hosting RFX (Reversed Field eXperiment), connected to the 400-kV transmission network, and the site hosting the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), connected to the 132-kV network. Analyses have been made to evaluate the impact on the two HV networks due to the additional NBI load. A particular aspect was studied in detail: during the NBI operation, very frequent accelerator grids breakdowns are expected, requiring fast de-energization of the main power supplies, followed by voltage re-application in about 50 ms; this can cause active and reactive power steps and consequent voltage fluctuations (flickers) on the HV networks. The analyses are described in the paper and the main results reported and discussed.
