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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.
Simppa Äkäslompolo, Taina Kurki-Suonio, Seppo Sipilä, ASCOT Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 69 | Number 3 | May 2016 | Pages 620-627
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-184
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Measuring fast ions, most notably fusion alphas, in ITER and future reactors remains an issue that still lacks an adequate solution. Numerical simulations are invaluable in testing the potential and limitations of various proposed diagnostics. However, the validity of the numerical tools first has to be checked against results from existing tokamaks. In this contribution, various synthetic diagnostics for fast ions (collective Thomson scattering, neutral particle analyzer, neutron camera, infrared measurements, fast ion loss detector, and activation probe) from the orbit-following Monte Carlo code ASCOT are compared to measurements from several tokamaks (ASDEX Upgrade, DIII-D, and JET). Within the limitations of the physics included in the numerical model and availability of input data from experiments, the agreement between synthetic data and measurements is found to be quite good.
