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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.
F. Warmer, C. D. Beidler, A. Dinklage, Y. Turkin, R. Wolf
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 4 | November 2015 | Pages 727-740
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-131
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In fusion power plant studies, a high confinement improvement with respect to empirical scaling is often assumed in the design of compact machines. In this work, the limits of such a confinement enhancement are studied for a helical-axis advanced stellarator (HELIAS).
As a first exercise, the well-established power balance approach is used to investigate the impact of confinement enhancement (in terms of the ISS04 renormalization factor) on the required size of HELIAS power plants. It is found that both a lower (0.5) and an upper limit (1.5 to 1.7) exist for which, respectively, ignition is no longer possible or further confinement enhancement irrelevant due to physics limits.
In the second part of the work, a predictive neoclassical transport model is introduced and employed to determine a self-consistent confinement time based on transport modelling. It is found that the confinement enhancement with respect to the ISS04 scaling decreases in comparison to Wendelstein 7-X as the device is scaled to reactor size, dropping from ~2.5 to a range of 1.2 to 1.3. This behavior is explained with underlying scaling relations and transport effects. The results from both models are consistent and important for future HELIAS systems studies.
