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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.
Sante Cirant
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 53 | Number 1 | January 2008 | Pages 12-38
Technical Paper | Special Issue on Electron Cyclotron Wave Physics, Technology, and Applications - Part 2 | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1650
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In any system designed for electron cyclotron (EC) heating (ECH) and EC current drive in fusion plasmas, the launcher is the matching element between the plasma and the transmission line. Only an appropriate launcher achieves efficient use of the gyrotron power for the many different high-power EC H&CD applications. The frontier is now set at [approximately equal to]4 MW of launched power at 110 to 140 GHz for [approximately equal to]10 s, to be further moved to [approximately equal to]10 MW, 1000 s in the near future. ITER will push the limit to 20 MW, 170 GHz. The workhorse of the antenna system is the front steering setup consisting of a movable mirror, or a mirror array, in front of the hot plasma, which provides for full flexibility in the EC H&CD applications. However, because of the concern associated with cooled and movable parts in a hostile environment, an arrangement with movable mirrors positioned far from the vessel port, and connected to the plasma by imaging waveguides, is being developed as a remote steering backup solution. In a reactor, where flexibility is much less relevant than reliability, the situation could reverse. Techniques for a radial scan of the deposition layer different from front beam steering are discussed in this paper. The ideal goal would be a 100% coupling of the launched EC power, to occur within [approximately equal to]2% of the plasma size and through pipes of size negligible with respect to the vessel, without negative impact on plasma periphery in spite of the high power densities transmitted through the edge.