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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.
Yoshikazu Okumura
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 2 | August 2013 | Pages 86-95
Keynote and Plenary - I | Proceedings of the Twentieth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE-2012) (Part 1), Nashville, Tennessee, August 27-31, 2012 | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-583
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Five years have passed since the Broader Approach (BA) activities launched in 2007 under the framework of collaboration between Japan and EURATOM. In the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility (IFMIF) Engineering Validation and Engineering Design Activities (EVEDA) project, commissioning of the prototype lithium test loop was completed in March 2011, and a lithium flow of 25 mm thick at 15 m/s was obtained in July 2012. Components of the prototype accelerator are being fabricated. Injector will be delivered in Rokkasho in March 2013 followed by the validation test of the accelerator. In the International Fusion Energy Research Center (IFERC) project, five R&Ds mainly on DEMO blanket are being carried out at a newly constructed DEMO R&D facility. A high performance supercomputer with a LINPAC performance of 1.27 Pflops is now operational for the fusion simulation. In the Satellite Tokamak Program (STP) project, JT-60 torus disassembly is almost completed, and manufacture of tokamak components such as PF coils, vacuum vessel, cryostat are being fabricated on schedule. JT-60SA construction will start in Dec.2012. Present status and recent achievements of these BA activities are summarized.