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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.
David L. Smith, Michael G. Mazarakis, Craig L. Olson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 4 | November 2007 | Pages 922-926
Technical Paper | Inertial Fusion Technology: Drivers and Advanced Designs | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1611
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A 70-MA, 7-MV, ~100-ns driver for a Z-pinch Inertial Fusion Energy (Z-IFE) power plant has been proposed. In this summary we address the transition region between the 70 Linear Transformer Driver (LTD) modules and the center Recyclable Transmission Line (RTL) load section, which convolves from the coaxial vacuum Magnetically Insulated Transmission Lines (MITL) to a parallel tri-plate and then a bi-plate disk feed. An inductive annular chamber terminates one side of the tri-plate in a manner that preserves vacuum and electrical circuit integrity without significant energy losses. The simplicity is offset by the disadvantage of the chamber size, which is proportional to the driver impedance and decreases with the addition of more parallel modules. Inductive isolation chamber sizes are estimated in this paper, based on an optimized LTD equivalent circuit simulation source driving a matched load using transmission line models. We consider the trade-offs between acceptable energy loss and the size of the inductive isolation chamber; accepting a 6% energy loss would only require a 60-nH chamber.
