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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.
C. A. Flanagan, T. G. Brown, W. R. Hamilton, V. D. Lee, Y-K. M. Peng, T. E. Shannon, P. T. Spampinato, J. J. Yugo, D. B. Montgomery, L. Bromberg, D. Cohn, R. M. Thome, John C. Commander, Robert H. Wyman, J. A. Schmidt, C. W. Bushnell, J. C. Citrolo, R. B. Fleming, D. Huttar, D. Post, Jr., K. Young, F. A. Puhn, R. Gallix, E. R. Hager, J. R. Bartlit, D. W. Swain
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 10 | Number 3 | November 1986 | Pages 491-497
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-A24794
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Compact Ignition Tokamak (CIT) mission is to achieve ignition and provide the capability to experimentally study burning plasma behavior. A national team has developed a baseline concept including definition of the necessary research and development. The baseline concept satisfies the physics performance objectives established for the project and complies with defined design specifications. To ensure that the mission is achieved, the design requires large magnetic fields on axis ( ∼ 10 T) and use of large plasma currents ( ∼ 10 MA). The design is capable of accommodating significant auxiliary heating to enter the ignited regime. The CIT is designed to operate in plasma parameter regimes that are directly relevant to future fusion power reactors. The CIT uses a high-strength copper-Inconel composite plate toroidal magnet design and relies on inertial cooling starting from a liquid nitrogen temperature at the beginning of each pulse. The design is capable of both limiter and divertor operation. The design is compact (1.22 m major radius, 0.45 m plasma radius), has 20 toroidal field (TF) magnets, and has ten major horizontal access ports, about 20 cm by 80 cm, located between alternate TF coils. A total of 3000 full parameter deuterium-tritium (D-T) pulses and 50,000 partial parameter pulses are planned; each full parameter pulse is about 3–5 s. Significant fusion power (300–400 MW depending on ignition assumptions) will be generated; corresponding neutron wall loadings will be in the range 5–10 MW/m2. The current schedule is for a construction project to be authorized for the period FY 1988–93.