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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.
Gen Chen, Yanping Zhao, Yuzhou Mao, Yuan Shuai, Xinjun Zhang, Chengming Qing
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 2 | February 2017 | Pages 144-149
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-228
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Ion cyclotron resonance frequency (ICRF) heating is one of the traditional auxiliary heating methods adopted in the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST). The radio-frequency (rf) source consisting of eight transmitters has been fabricated since 2012 and has a working frequency of 24 to 70 MHz. It has a maximum total power of ~12 MW. However, the power injection into plasma has been restricted by the variable antenna load, which is sensitive to the scrape-off-layer boundary condition and the gradient distribution of plasma density. Triple liquid stub tuners, which have been employed for ICRF impedance matching, cannot cope with such rapid variations because of the low response speed. In previous research, a 300-kW ferrite tuner (FT) was developed and tested, but it was not good enough to meet the requirements of real-time impedance matching. Research on a high-power fast-response FT with maximum power of 1.5 MW was carried out to achieve real-time tuning to trace the load variations of the antenna. The design parameters of the FT were determined according to the experimental data of the antenna load in EAST. The ferrite material, rf circuit, and magnet system of the FT were discussed to satisfy the design goals. The test results showed good performance of response time, differential phase shift, and insertion loss, which was extremely significant for the high-power, real-time operation of an impedance matching network based on FTs.