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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.
Masami Ohnishi, Osawa Hodaka, Tomoya Furukawa, Takashi Suma
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 4 | November 2007 | Pages 1101-1104
Technical Paper | Nonelectric Applications | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1644
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A neutron production rate (NPR) of 2.3 × 106 1/sec has been achieved in a spherically convergent D-D fusion neutron generator with the applied voltage 60 kV and the steady-state discharge current 40 mA. The scaling of NPR with respect to the current, however, is linear. The results revealed the fact that the fusion reaction occurs mainly between the accelerated molecular ion D2+ and neutral gas D20. In considering a future application of the neutron source, the dependence on a square current, i.e., the fact that the main reactions are caused by accelerated ion beam-beam colliding fusions is most desirable. A new IEC device has been constructed in order to obtain evidence of beam-beam colliding fusions. The device is designed to operate in a short pulse of the voltage -70 kV and the large current 100 A. This is the first experiment to draw a current of several tens of amperes in IEC devices. The discharge characteristics were studied with regard to the relations of the current, applied voltage and gas pressure. The neutron production rate was also measured, and the conditions to realize accelerated ion beam-beam fusion are discussed.
