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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.
T. Someya, S. Kawata, T. Nakamura, A. I. Ogoyski, K. Shimizu, J. Sasaki
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 43 | Number 3 | May 2003 | Pages 282-289
Technical Paper | Targets and Target Protection During Injection | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A268
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Key issues of heavy-ion beam (HIB) inertial confinement fusion (ICF) include an efficient beam transport, beam focus, uniform fuel pellet implosion, etc. The HIB final transport and a direct-drive fuel pellet implosion by computer simulations in HIB ICF are examined. To realize a fine focus on a fuel pellet, space charge neutralization of incident-focusing HIBs may be required at HIB final transport. First, an insulator annular tube guide is proposed at the final portion of the transport, through which an HIB is transported. The physical mechanism of HIB charge neutralization based on an insulator guide is as follows: The local electric field created by HIB induces local discharges, and a plasma is produced on the insulator inner surface. Then electrons are extracted from the plasma by HIB net space charge. The emitted electrons neutralize the beam space charge and move together with the HIB. After the final transport, the HIBs enter a reactor gas and illuminate a fuel pellet. Direct-drive DT pellet implosion were also simulated. The simulation results present a density valley formation by a Pb HIB deposition in a fuel pellet energy absorber layer and a radiation-smoothing effect along the density valley. The density valley provides radiation confinement, and beam nonuniformity can be smoothed along the valley.