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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.
M. Kobayashi, N. Ohyabu, T. Mutoh, R. Kumazawa, Y. Feng, M. Shoji, T. Morisaki, S. Masuzaki, A. Sagara, R. Sakamoto, T. Seki, J. Miyazawa, T. Watanabe, M. Goto, K. Ideda, H. Kasahara, S. Morita, B. J. Peterson, N. Ashikawa, K. Saito, S. Sakakibara, T. Tokuzawa, Y. Nakamura, K. Narihara, I. Yamada, H. Yamada, A. Komori, O. Motojima, LHD Experimental Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 3 | October 2007 | Pages 566-573
Technical Paper | The Technology of Fusion Energy - High Heat Flux Components | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1549
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The divertor performance of LHD is studied for the two configurations, LID and HD. It is shown that the both divertor configurations play important roles for obtaining high performance plasmas in LHD: the large pumping capability of the LID to keep the low edge density in the IDB-SDC plasma, the large wetted area and the flexibility of strike point sweep of HD to reduce the power load on the divertor plates in long pulse operations. The possible effect of the ergodic layer on impurity retention in divertor is discussed by using the 3D edge transport modelling. It is found that the drag force exerted by the plasma flow can dominate over the thermal force, providing the impurity retention effect. The further changes needed to improve the current divertor configurations are discussed. New divertor designs for the future upgrade of LHD and for a LHD-type reactor are presented.
