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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.
William M. Sharp, Debra A. Callahan, Max Tabak, Simon S. Yu, Per F. Peterson, Dale R. Welch, David V. Rose, Craig L. Olson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 43 | Number 3 | May 2003 | Pages 393-400
Technical Paper | Chambers and Chamber Wall Protection Methods | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A283
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a typical thick-liquid-wall scenario for heavy-ion fusion (HIF), between 70 and 200 high-current beams approach the target chamber in entry pipes and propagate ~3 m to the target. Since molten-salt jets are planned to protect the chamber wall, the beams move through vapor from the jets, and collisions between beam ions and this background gas both strip the ions and ionize the gas molecules. Radiation from the preheated target causes further beam stripping and gas ionization. Because of this stripping, beams for HIF are expected to require substantial neutralization in a target chamber. Much recent research has, therefore, focused on beam neutralization by electron sources that were neglected in earlier simulations, including emission from walls and the target, photoionization by the target radiation, and preneutralization by a plasma generated along the beam path. When these effects are included in simulations with practicable beam and chamber parameters, the resulting focal spot is approximately the size required by a distributed radiator target.