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Latest News
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.
S. K. Combs, L. R. Baylor, D. T. Fehling, P. W. Fisher, C. R. Foust, D. A. Rasmussen, J. B. Wilgen, B. E. Chapman, S. P. Oliva, S. C. Prager, J. S. Sarff, M. D. Wyman, D. L. Brower, W. X. Ding, S. D. Terry, B. H. Deng
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 44 | Number 2 | September 2003 | Pages 513-517
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Plasma Engineering, Heating, and Current Drive | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A388
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A compact pellet injection system that was recently developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been installed on the Madison Symmetric Torus (MST) at the University of Wisconsin and used in initial plasma fueling experiments. The system, referred to as a "pellet injector in a suitcase," is a pipe gun device with a four-barrel capability (presently equipped with two 1.0-mm-bore barrels), and it uses a cryogenic refrigerator for in-situ hydrogen pellet formation (typically, D2 pellets). This new, portable, stand-alone pellet injection system was developed to provide a flexible means of plasma fueling on a wide variety of magnetic confinement devices, with relatively low costs for installation and operation. The injector has already been used to produce useful results with pellets on MST plasmas, including significant and rapid increases (almost 100%) in the line average density, and effectively depositing fuel in the plasma core (central densities of [approximately equal to] 1.4 × 1019 m-3). In this paper, the injection system, its performance, and reliability will be described, and results from some initial MST pellet experiments will be highlighted.
