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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.
Seungil Park, Jinhyun Jeong, Won Namkung, Moo-Hyun Cho, Young S. Bae, Won-Soon Han, Hyung-Lyeol Yang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 1 | January 2009 | Pages 56-63
Technical Paper | Electron Cyclotron Emission and Electron Cyclotron Resonance Heating | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A4053
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An 84-GHz electron cyclotron heating (ECH) system has been installed to assist plasma start-up by preionization in the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) device. The KSTAR 84-GHz ECH system consists of a 500-kW gyrotron, a transmission line, and an antenna system. The wave power is transmitted from the gyrotron to the antenna through an evacuated corrugated circular waveguide of 31.75-mm inner diameter and six miter bends, which include a pair of polarizer miter bends for polarization control. The maximum permitted vacuum pressure without radio-frequency (rf) breakdown in the 31.75-mm waveguide at 84 GHz, 500 kW was calculated to be ~0.1 torr. The pumping time to reach the vacuum pressure of 1 × 10-3 torr in the KSTAR ECH system was ~2 h by two turbomolecular pumps. The transmission efficiency of ~93% from the output of the mirror optical unit to the torus window was measured using a low-power rf source. The wave polarization by a pair of polarizer miter bends with grooved mirrors was tested using the low-power system, and it showed good agreement with numerical calculations. In this paper, we present the design and commissioning results of the KSTAR 84-GHz transmission line.
