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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.
L. C. Cadwallader, T. Pinna, P. I. Petersen
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 4 | November 2007 | Pages 979-984
Technical Paper | Tritium, Safety, and Environment | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1621
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents the results of a task to analyze the operating experience data for large, pulsed power supplies used at the DIII-D tokamak. This activity supports the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project by giving fusion-specific reliability values for large power supplies that energize neutral beams and magnets. These failure rate data are necessary to perform system availability calculations and to make estimates of the frequency of safety-significant events (e.g., power supply arcs or fires) that might occur in other fusion facilities such as ITER. The analysis shows that the DIII-D data results compare well with the results of similar data analysis work that the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment (ENEA) has performed on the JET tokamak and compare fairly with data from two accelerators.
