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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
D. Andruczyk, D. N. Ruzic, D. Curreli, J. P. Allain, HIDRA Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 3 | October 2015 | Pages 497-500
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-989
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Hybrid Illinois Device for Research and Applications (HIDRA) is a medium sized classical stellarator using a l = 2, m = 5 configuration with a major radius R = 0.72 m and minor radius a = 0.19 m. HIDRA will initially be operated with 26 kW of magnetron heating (2.45 GHz) and will operate with a magnetic fields B0 = 0.087 T to 0.5 T. Electron temperatures up to Te = 20 eV and densities up to ne = 1×1018 m-3 are expected with Bernstein wave heating (OXB). HIDRA has a flexible magnetic configuration due to the addition of vertical field coils. HIDRA will be used mainly in the development of new dedicated plasma material interaction experiments in a fusion type environment. Development of multi-scale and multi phase materials adaptive to extreme environment will be a focus of HIDRA and UIUC’s expertise with in-situ diagnostics of materials will open up new opportunities for innovative material testing. HIDRA will also serve as an education and training the next generation of plasma and fusion scientists and engineers. Basic plasma physics with an emphasis on plasma material interactions will be a focus of HIDRA using established diagnostic techniques as well as the development of new diagnostics for understanding the basic plasma physics and plasma material interactions.
