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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.
A. Bruschi, W. Bin, S. Cirant, F. Gandini, V. Mellera, V. Muzzini
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 53 | Number 1 | January 2008 | Pages 62-68
Technical Paper | Special Issue on Electron Cyclotron Wave Physics, Technology, and Applications - Part 2 | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1653
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Beam absorbers play an important role both in electron cyclotron heating systems at high power and in millimeter-wave diagnostics that need a low level of stray or reflected power. In the first case short- and long-pulse loads are used, whose back-reflection can be kept within a few percent with proper techniques. In the second case, absorbers or scramblers are envisaged, to be put in hostile environments. At Istituto di Fisica del Plasma in Milan, a number of calorimetric loads have been developed, adopting several techniques for overall reflectivity reduction, which are suitable for beam sinking with calorimetric capability. They achieve a low overall reflectivity and high-power capability by a properly chosen power distribution in the absorbing wall provided by a dispersing mirror, by a smooth geometrical shape, by heat-resistant absorbing coatings of optimized thickness, and by accurate trapping of most of the escaping radiation with preload structures. Fundamental, when it becomes impossible to diffuse the incoming beam by the mirror alone, mostly because of side lobes at large angles, is the use of a newly developed phase-scrambling surface presented in this paper. It provides the necessary spreading, complementing all the other techniques into a set that can be helpful in designing millimeter-wave systems and diagnostics, in order to reduce spurious or unwanted signals.