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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. J. H. Donné, C. J. Barth, H. Weisen
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 53 | Number 2 | February 2008 | Pages 397-430
Technical Paper | Plasma Diagnostics for Magnetic Fusion Research | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1676
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Laser-aided diagnostics are widely applied in the field of high-temperature plasma diagnostics for a large variety of measurements. Incoherent Thomson scattering is used for highly localized measurements of the electron temperature and density in the plasma. Coherent Thomson scattering yields information on the fast ion population in the plasma and/or depending on the geometry and wavelength chosen electron density fluctuations. Interferometry and polarimetry are often combined in a single diagnostics setup to measure the electron density and the component of the magnetic field parallel to the laser chord. Density fluctuations can be measured by means of phase contrast imaging, scattering, and various other laser-aided techniques. This paper is primarily focused on laser diagnostics utilized in the mainstream magnetic confinement research (tokamaks and stellarators with some examples from other devices if applicable). In the paper a brief tutorial introduction in each of the techniques is given, followed by a description of some typical implementations on magnetic confinement devices and some examples of recent experimental results. For each of the techniques the potential application to the ITER tokamak is also discussed. The paper is not meant as a comprehensive and exhaustive review giving a proper tribute to all the work that has been done in this field over the years.