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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.
Stephen C. Jardin, Charles E. Kessel, Dale Meade, Charles L. Neumeyer, Jr.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 43 | Number 2 | March 2003 | Pages 161-175
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A257
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new burning plasma systems code has been developed for analysis of a next step compact burning plasma experiment with copper-alloy magnet technology. Two classes of configurations are considered: type A, with the toroidal field (TF) coils and ohmic heating (OH) coils unlinked, and type B, with the TF and OH coils linked. Curves of the minimizing major radius as a function of aspect ratio R(A) are obtained for each configuration type for typical parameters. These curves represent, to first order, cost-minimizing curves. The type B curves always lie below the type A curves for the same physics parameters, indicating that they lead to a more compact design. However, the fact that the type A OH and TF magnets are not linked presents fewer engineering challenges and should lead to a more reliable design. Both the type A and type B curves have a minimum in major radius R at a minimizing aspect ratio A typically above 2.8 and at high values of magnetic field B above 10 T. The minimizing A occurs at larger values for longer pulse and higher performance devices. The larger A and higher B design points also have the feature that the ratio of the discharge time to the current redistribution time is largest so that steady-state operation can be more realistically prototyped. A sensitivity study is presented for the baseline type A configuration showing the dependence of the results on the parameters held fixed for the minimization study.