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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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. M. Lopez, J. Vega, S. Dormido-Canto, A. Murari, J. M. Ramirez, M. Ruiz, G. De Arcas, JET-EFDA Contributors
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 1 | January 2013 | Pages 26-33
Selected Paper from Seventh Fusion Data Validation Workshop 2012 (Part 3) | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-490
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Disruptions in tokamak devices are inevitable and can severely damage a tokamak device's wall. For this reason, different protection mechanisms have to be implemented. In the Joint European Torus (JET), these protection systems are structured in different levels. At the lowest level are those systems that are responsible for protecting the machine's integrity, which must be highly reliable. More complex systems are located at higher levels; these higher-level systems have been designed to take action before low-level systems. Since the installation of the new metallic wall in JET, new protection systems have been being developed to improve the overall protection of the device. This work focuses on a software application - a disruption predictor - that detects an incoming disruption. This software application simulates the behavior of a real-time implementation.In recent years, efforts have been devoted to developing and optimizing a reliable system that is capable of predicting disruptions. This has been accomplished by the novel combination of machine-learning techniques based on supervised learning methods. Disruptions must be predicted early enough so that the protection systems can mitigate the effects of disruptions. This paper summarizes the software development of the JET disruption predictor. This software simulates the real-time data acquisition and data processing. It has been an essential software tool to both optimize the disruption prediction model and implement a simulator of the real-time predictor.