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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.
A. Collazos, V. S. Udintsev, R. Chavan, F. Felici, F. Dolizy, M. A. Henderson, H. Shidara
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 1 | January 2009 | Pages 84-93
Technical Paper | Electron Cyclotron Emission and Electron Cyclotron Resonance Heating | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A4056
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The aim of the ITER electron cyclotron heating and current drive upper launcher (UL) is to control magnetohydrodynamic activity in the plasma, in particular neoclassical tearing modes, requiring a narrow and peaked deposition of the radio-frequency (rf) power.The millimeter-wave (mm-wave) system of the UL is optimized to ensure that the eight rf beams are all focused to a small beam width at the resonance location. The present design uses two mitre bends per beam and a focusing mirror for each set of four beams, orientating each set onto a single steering mirror (SM) to inject it into the plasma. The SM is rotated using a frictionless and backlash free pneumo-mechanical system. A first prototype of the SM has been constructed to demonstrate the manufacturability and the actuation principle and to develop an adequate control strategy.A test program has been developed to ensure the integrity of the launcher from the pre-build-to-print design phase (research and development) up to the tests after maintenance.This paper presents a general overview of the system, a description of the progress in the mm-wave optical layout, low-power tests, alignment specifications of the mm-wave components, and SM capabilities to meet the ITER requirements.
