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Latest News
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.
Jean Jacquinot, Martin Keilhacker, Paul-Henri Rebut
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 53 | Number 4 | May 2008 | Pages 866-890
Technical Paper | Special Issue on Joint European Torus (jet) | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1742
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The JET design, which started in 1973, introduced bold new concepts such as D-shaped plasmas in large tokamaks, a closed-loop tritium plant, and the use of beryllium as a first-wall material. It implied increasing by two orders of magnitudes the plasma volume and the heating power compared to the standard at the time. During the JET Joint Undertaking operation from 1978 to 1999, most of these design parameters were exceeded. After achieving all of its initial objectives, JET was upgraded and modified to establish H-mode scaling and to perform comprehensive studies of divertor and advanced tokamak concepts. JET holds all records in fusion power and energy and has allowed a unique experience in D-T operation to be gained. The JET results have made a decisive contribution to the scaling laws on which the basic layout and the dimensions of ITER are based. JET today under its new EFDA-JET organization is still the most powerful fusion device operating in the world, with potential to extend its performance even further. It has the essential mission to prepare for D-T burn in ITER and to train a new generation of scientists for developing fusion as an energy source.