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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.
J. Sheffield, R. A. Dory, W. A. Houlberg, N. A. Uckan, M. Bell, P. Colestock, J. Hosea, S. Kaye, M. Petravic, D. Post, S. D. Scott, K. M. Young, K. H. Burrell, N. Ohyabu, R. Stambaugh, M. Greenwald, P. Liewer, D. Ross, C. Singer, H. Weitzner
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 10 | Number 3 | November 1986 | Pages 481-490
The Compact Ignition Tokamak Program | Proceedings of the Seveth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Reno, Nevada, June 15–19, 1986) | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24793
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The goal of the Compact Ignition Tokamak (CIT) program is to provide a cost-effective route to the production of a burning deuterium-tritium plasma, so that alpha-particle effects may be studied. A key issue to be studied in the CIT is whether alpha power behaves like other power sources in affecting tokamak plasma confinement. The program is managed by the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and includes broad community involvement. Guidelines for the preliminary design effort have been provided by the Ignition Technical Oversight Committee in discussion with the tokamak community. The reference design is a tokamak with a high field (10 T), high current (10 MA), a poloidal divertor, and liquid-nitrogen-cooled coils. It is a small, high-power-density device of the type proposed by Bruno Coppi (MIT). It has a major radius of 1.23 m, a minor radius of 0.43 m, and a plasma ellipticity of 1.8. This paper reviews the aims of the program and the basis for the physics guidelines. The role of the CIT in the longer-term tokamak program is briefly discussed.
