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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.
HT-7 Team, Baonian Wan
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 42 | Number 1 | July 2002 | Pages 116-123
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A218
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The HT-7 tokamak experiment research has made important progress. The main efforts have dealt with quasi-steady-state operation, lower-hybrid (LH) current drive (LHCD), plasma heating with ion cyclotron range of frequencies (ICRF), ion Bernstein waves (IBWs), fueling with pellets and supersonic molecular beams, first-wall conditioning techniques, and plasma and wall interaction. Plasma parameters in the experiments were much improved; for example, ne = 6.5 × 1019 m-3, and a plasma pulse length of >10 s was achieved. ICRF boronization and conditioning resulted in Zeff close to unity. Steady-state full LH wave current drive has been achieved for >3 s. LHCD rampup and recharge have also been demonstrated. The best [eta]CDexp of 1019 m-2 A/W is achieved. Quasi-steady-state H-mode-like plasmas with a density close to the Greenwald limit were obtained by LHCD, where energy confinement time was nearly five times longer than in the ohmic case. The synergy between the IBW, pellet, and LHCD was investigated. New doped graphite as limiter material and ferritic steel used to reduce the ripples have been developed. Research on the mechanism of microturbulence has been extensively carried out experimentally.
