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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.
J.-P. Hogge, T. P. Goodman, S. Alberti, F. Albajar, K. A. Avramides, P. Benin, S. Bethuys, W. Bin, T. Bonicelli, A. Bruschi, S. Cirant, E. Droz, O. Dumbrajs, D. Fasel, F. Gandini, G. Gantenbein, S. Illy, S. Jawla, J. Jin, S. Kern, P. Lavanchy, C. Liévin, B. Marlétaz, P. Marmillod, A. Perez, B. Piosczyk, I. Pagonakis, L. Porte, T. Rzesnickl, U. Siravo, M. Thumm, M. Q. Tran
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 2 | February 2009 | Pages 204-212
Technical Paper | Electron Cyclotron Emission and Electron Cyclotron Resonance Heating | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A4072
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The European Union is working toward providing 2-MW, coaxial-cavity, continuous-wave (cw) 170-GHz gyrotrons for ITER. Their design is based on results from an experimental preprototype tube having a pulse length of several milliseconds, in operation at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe (FZK) for several years now. The first industrial prototype tube was designed for cw operation but, in a first phase, aimed at a pulse length of 1 s at the European Gyrotron Test Facility in Lausanne, Switzerland, as part of a phased testing/development program (1 s, 60 s, cw). The first experimental results of the operation of this prototype gyrotron are reported here. The microwave generation was characterized at very short pulse length (<0.01 s) using a load on loan from FZK, and the highest measured output power was 1.4 MW, at a beam energy significantly lower than the design value (83 kV instead of 90 kV), limited by arcing in the tube. The radio-frequency (rf) beam profile was measured to allow reconstruction of the phase and amplitude profile at the window and to provide the necessary information permitting proper alignment of the compact rf loads prior to pulse extension. Arcs in the tube limited the pulse length extension to a few tens of milliseconds. According to present planning, the tube is going to be opened, inspected, and refurbished, depending on the results of the inspection, to allow testing of an improved version of the mode launcher and replacement of some subassemblies.