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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. Fernández, A. Cappa, F. Castejón, J. M. Fontdecaba, K. Nagasaki
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 53 | Number 1 | January 2008 | Pages 254-260
Technical Note | Special Issue on Electron Cyclotron Wave Physics, Technology, and Applications - Part 2 | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1670
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Electron cyclotron current drive (ECCD) experiments carried out in the TJ-II stellarator are presented. In all the analyzed plasma discharges, the second-harmonic electron cyclotron resonance heating (ECRH) power is launched on-axis from two low-field-side stellarator symmetric positions. To investigate the ECCD properties of the device, the dependence of the total toroidal plasma current on the launching direction of both ECRH beams at fixed density conditions, and on the line average density for some fixed launching configurations, has been determined. In the launching direction scan, only discharges with similar density and temperature profiles have been studied, in order to avoid strong modifications of the bootstrap current contribution and the refraction properties of the plasma. Moreover, the measurements of the toroidal plasma current and the plasma profiles are taken at the end of the discharge, when approximately steady-state conditions are achieved. Using the normalized current drive efficiency as defined by ECCD [identical] <ne> IECCDR/PECRH, we have obtained values up to ECCD [approximately equal to] 0.001 × 1020 A W-1 m-2.
