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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.
Hiroyuki Shidara, Kazunobu Nagasaki, Kinzo Sakamoto, Hidetoshi Yukimoto, Masahiko Nakasuga, Fumimichi Sano, Katsumi Kondo, Tohru Mizuuchi, Hiroyuki Okada, Sakae Besshou, Shinji Kobayashi, Yoshito Manabe, Hayato Kawazome, Tasho Takamiya, Yoshinori Ohno, Hiroyasu Kubo, Yusuke Nishioka, Masao Iriguchi, Masashi Kaneko, Koichi Takahashi, Yohei Fukagawa, Yuya Morita, Masaki Yamada, Shingo Nakazawa, Shintaro Tsuboi, Shigeru Nishio, Victor Orlov, Alexander Pavelyev, Alexander Tolkachev, Victor Tribaldos, Tokuhiro Obiki
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 45 | Number 1 | January 2004 | Pages 41-48
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A424
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A 70-GHz electron cyclotron resonance heating (ECRH) system has been constructed in a helical-axis heliotron device, Heliotron J, in order to realize localized heating and current drive experiments. Since the Heliotron J plasma has a three-dimensional complex shape, the ECRH system is designed to satisfy the requirement of wide steering capability in both the toroidal and poloidal directions. The low-power transmission test shows that the beam radius of the focused Gaussian beam is 22 mm at the magnetic axis, which is small enough compared to the averaged minor plasma radius (170 mm), and the launching system covers a wide toroidal steering range from perpendicular to tangential injection by replacing the steering plane mirror. Since these characteristics satisfy the condition for controlling the power localization in the three-dimensional helical-axis configuration, it is possible to explore the on- and off-axis heating over most of the plasma radius (0 < r/a < 0.7) and the electron cyclotron current drive. In the high-power transmission test, the transmission efficiency of the 20-m corrugated waveguide is 92%, and the available output power to the vacuum vessel is up to 0.4 MW. Plasma production and heating are successfully performed using this ECRH system.
