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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.
Ronald C. Kirkpatrick
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 4 | November 2007 | Pages 1075-1078
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering and Diagnostics | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1639
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper deals with magnetized target fusion (MTF), which proposes to use a magnetic field to reduce the electron thermal conduction and to enhance energy deposition by the charged fusion products. Here we discuss two important aspects of charged particle interaction with the magnetized plasma: 1) the effect of the magnetic field on the stopping power of the plasma and 2) increased charged particle path length within the fusion fuel due to the contortion of the path by the field. The effect of the field on the stopping power depends on the ratios of several plasma parameters, including the Debye length, the Larmor radius, and the relative values of plasma, cyclotron, and collision frequencies. For the MTF regime these parameters are linked due to the need to have adequately magnetized plasma for the reduction of electron thermal conductivity and the need for adequately reduced density to insure that the radiation from the plasma is not too high. We use partially analytic results to show how field gradients shrink the size of the fusion ignition region in the Lindl-Widner diagrams.