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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.
Tomoyuki Johzaki, Kunioki Mima, Yasuyuki Nakao, Tomohiro Yokota, Hiroyuki Sumita
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 43 | Number 3 | May 2003 | Pages 428-436
Technical Paper | Fast Ignition Targets and Z-Pinch Concepts | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A288
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To investigate core plasma heating in fast ignition, a relativistic Fokker-Planck code for fast electrons is developed in a one-dimensional planar coordinates system. It is found that in dense plasmas, the Joule heating is much smaller than the heating through Coulomb interactions. In the latter energy deposition process, the long-range collective effect is comparable to that of binary electron-electron collisions. Moreover, on the basis of coupled transport-hydrodynamic simulations in one-dimensional planar geometry, the core heating process for an ignition-experiment-grade compressed core (R = 0.3 g/cm2) is examined, and a possibility of evaluation of burn history from the neutron spectrum is shown. It is shown that a relatively low energy component (E0 1 MeV) of electron beams plays an important role for effective core heating in fast ignition.