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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.
H. Takahashi, A. Okamoto, T. Takahashi, S. Kitajima
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 1 | July 2015 | Pages 190-195
Technical Note | Open Magnetic Systems 2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-910
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This technical note reports the first experimental investigation aiming for divertor plasma dynamics study using helium recombining plasma and energetic helium ion beam. A divertor plasma relevant experiment was performed using a linear plasma device, DT-ALPHA, and a multicusp ion source. The radial profiles of the line emission intensities from helium Rydberg atoms were investigated, and the reaction rate of volumetric recombination was confirmed to increase in the central region of the cylindrical plasma. Then an energetic helium ion beam was superimposed onto the helium recombining plasma. The optical emission intensities from the helium recombining plasma with and without energetic ions were obtained and compared. The temporal evolution of the optical emission indicated that charge-exchange momentum transfer between energetic helium ions and ground state helium atoms can affect population density even in recombining plasma where population density is dominated by recombining processes rather than ionizing processes.