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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.
S.-H. Hong, K.-M. Kim, J.-H. Song, E.-N. Bang, H.-T. Kim, K.-S. Lee, A. Litnovsky, M. Hellwig, D. C. Seo, H. H. Lee, C. S. Kang, H.-Y. Lee, J.-H. Hong, J. G. Bak, H.-S. Kim, J.-W. Juhn, S.-H. Son, H.-K. Kim, D. Douai, C. Grisolia, J. Wu, G.-N. Luo, W.-H. Choe, M. Komm, M. van den Berg, G. De Temmerman, R. Pitts
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 1 | July 2015 | Pages 36-43
Technical Paper | Open Magnetic Systems 2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-897
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the main missions of KSTAR is to develop long-pulse operation capability relevant to the production of fusion energy. After a full metal wall configuration was decided for ITER, a major upgrade for KSTAR was planned, to a tungsten first wall similar to the JET ITER-like wall (coatings and bulk tungsten plasma-facing components). To accomplish the upgrade, tungsten bonding technology has been developed and tested. Since the leading edges of each castellation structure have to be protected, shaping of tungsten blocks has been studied by ANSYS simulation, and the miniaturized castellation has been exposed to Ohmic plasma to confirm the simulation results. It is found that a shaped castellation block has more heat handling capability than a conventional block. For more dedicated experiments, a multipurpose castellation block is fabricated and exposed to Ohmic, L- and H-mode plasmas and observed by IR camera from the top. During the fabrication and assembly of the blocks, leading edges caused by “naturally misaligned” blocks due to engineering limits with a maximum level up to 0.5 mm have been observed, and these have to be minimized for the future fusion machine.
