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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.
Tetsuya Nishi, Kei Yoneda, Kai Masuda, Kiyoshi Yoshikawa
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 4 | November 2007 | Pages 1061-1065
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering and Diagnostics | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1636
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A 21S metastable helium atomic beam injector was studied for a beam probe of electric field diagnoses, which is applicable to high electric potential region in Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Fusion (IECF) plasmas where a solid probe can hardly be utilized. With deuterium background gas (~0.1Pa) which is the minimum operation pressure of the IECF devices, the beam density was found to decrease ten times lower than beam density without background gas because of collisional effect. Also, plasma parameters in a-magnetron-discharge-based exciter were evaluated by means of Langmuir probe and emission spectroscopy. These results strongly imply a high excitation rate of ~10-4 into 21S metastable state.
