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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.
Wayne A. Houlberg, James T. Lacatski, Nermin A. Uckan
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 10 | Number 2 | September 1986 | Pages 227-235
Technical Paper | Fusion Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24974
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Confinement and engineering issues of a small (average minor radius ā ≃ 1 m) moderate-aspect-ratio torsatron reactor are evaluated. The Advanced Toroidal Facility design is used as a starting point because of its relatively low aspect ratio and high beta capabilities. The major limitation of the compact size is the lack of space under the helical coils for the blanket and shield. Some combination of lower aspect ratio coils, higher coil current density, thinner coils, and more effective shielding material under the coils should be incorporated into future designs to improve the feasibility of small torsatron reactor concepts. Current neoclassical confinement models for helically trapped particles show that a large radial electric field (in terms of the electric potential, eφ/T ≥ 3) is necessary to achieve ignition in a device of this size.