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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.
Yong Liu, Enyao Wang, Xuantong Ding, Longwen Yan, Shangjie Qian, Jiancheng Yan
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 42 | Number 1 | July 2002 | Pages 94-101
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A215
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Experimental progress with the HL-1M tokamak has been made in many areas including confinement improvement, auxiliary heating, plasma fueling, and wall conditionings. An H-mode induced by a biased electrode was obtained with the formation of an internal transport barrier at the region of r/a ~ 0.4 to 0.5. Confinement improvement by lower-hybrid current drive (LHCD) was extensively investigated. Confinement improvement seems to be related to the production of the radial electron field during LHCD. In off-axis electron cyclotron resonance heating (ECRH), double sawteeth in soft X-ray radiation were observed, which implies that reversed magnetic shear could be formed during ECRH. At higher ECRH power, when the resonance position is near the q = 1 surface, fishbone instability was observed and investigated. An eight-shot pellet injector was used for the experiments. The pellet ablation process was investigated with a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera and an H emission detector array. Clearly, asymmetry in the pellet cloud was observed in both the toroidal and poloidal directions. It has been found that the pellet velocity slows down clearly after the pellet enters the plasma. The density limit has been investigated on HL-1M at different wall conditionings with three kinds of fueling methods. It was found that a higher density limit could be achieved under the following conditions: (a) a strong reduction of the impurity content after siliconization and (b) a peaked density profile with pellet injection and/or supersonic molecular beam injection. With a neutral beam injection (NBI) system of 1 MW, preliminary results of NBI experiments were obtained with an increase of ion temperature from 450 to 700 eV.