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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. Wu, H. Momota, G. H. Miley
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 4 | November 2007 | Pages 1056-1060
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering and Diagnostics | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1635
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Interactions of charge exchange and ionization of fast, low-charged heavy ions are very important in heavy ion beam inertial confinement fusion. These effects are crucial indetermination of the final focusing in the chamber. However, corresponding cross section data is very limited and/or not accurate over the entire range of energies and ions of interest. This paper reports on our recent studies of cross sections for interactions of heavy ions with noble gases. Since a quantum mechanical treatment encounters a complex many-body problem, a classical trajectory Monte Carlo method is employed. The distribution of inner electrons is estimated by a modified Hartree-Fock model for the purpose of decreasing the number of electron orbits calculated, a micro-canonical ensemble for the initial electron probability distribution is introduced to describe quantum mechanical uncertainty. Cross sections are evaluated over a limited energy range; then scaling laws are developed to reflect the change probability for the beam charge state over a larger energy range.