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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.
N. M. Ghoniem, M. A. Firestone, R. W. Conn
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 10 | Number 3 | November 1986 | Pages 1133-1145
Fusion Reactor Design—II | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24884
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Operational aspects of a model tokamak system with a solid-breeder blanket are presented. The model blanket is an evolution of the STARFIRE and BCSS design studies. Full-power reactor operation is at a neutron wall loading of 5 MW/m2 and a surface heat flux of 1 MW/m2. The blanket is a pressurized steel module with bare beryllium rods and low-activation HT-9-(9-C-) clad LiA102 rods. The helium coolant pressure is 5 MPa, entering the module at 297°C and exiting at 550°C. The system power output is rated at 1000 MW(e). In this paper, we present our findings on various operational scenarios and their impact on system design. We first start with the salient aspects of operational physics. Time-dependent analyses of the blanket and balance of plant are then presented.
