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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.
T. Görler, A. E. White, D. Told, F. Jenko, C. Holland, T. L. Rhodes
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 69 | Number 2 | April 2016 | Pages 537-545
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-182
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Over the last decade, plasma turbulence simulations based on gyrokinetic theory have reached an amazing degree of physical comprehensiveness and realism. In contrast to early gyrokinetic studies, which were restricted to qualitative statements, state-of-the-art investigations may now be compared quantitatively, therefore enabling validation and detailed analysis of their predictive capabilities. Here, particular attention is paid to outer-core L-mode discharges for which some previous gyrokinetic studies have found an underprediction of ion heat transport by almost one order of magnitude, the so-called shortfall. Carrying out radially local and nonlocal GENE simulations using actual plasma profiles and parameters and magnetohydrodynamic equilibria, and employing as much physics as available, only a mild underprediction is found, which can, furthermore, be overcome by varying the ion temperature gradient within the error bars associated with the experimental measurement. The significance and reliability of these simulations is furthermore demonstrated by extensive comparison with experimental measurements. The latter involve sophisticated synthetic beam emission spectroscopy and correlation electron cyclotron emission data analysis. The agreement found between the measurements and the state-of-the-art postprocessed simulation data confirms the high degree of realism.