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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.
V.S. Koidan, R.Yu. Akentjev, A.V. Arzhannikov, V.T. Astrelin, A.V. Burdakov, I.A. Ivanov, M.V. Ivantsivsky, V.V. Konyukhov, A.G. Makarov, K.I. Mekler, S.S. Perin, S.V. Polosatkin, V.V. Postupaev, A.F. Rovenskikh, S.L. Sinitsky, V.D. Stepanov, Yu.S. Sulyaev, A.A. Shoshin, Eh.R. Zubairov
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 43 | Number 1 | January 2003 | Pages 30-36
Overview | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A11963559
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Review of the experimental results for the last two years on study of dense plasma heating and confinement in a long multimirror trap GOL-3 is presented. This facility is an open trap for confinement of hot (0.1-1 keV) dense (1015-1016 cm−3) plasma. The plasma heating is provided by a high-power electron beam (1 MeV, 30 kA, 8 μs) with energy content of up to 200 kJ. The upgrade to full-scale corrugation of a magnetic field was completed at the facility during last two years. In the 12-meter solenoid the multimirror sections of 4-m-length were made at the both ends of the solenoid (Bmax/Bmin = 5,2 / 3,2 T, cell length is 22 cm). The modified source of preliminary plasma was put in operation for improvement of macroscopically stable beam transport through the plasma column. New diagnostics were developed for the experiments. Search of optimal conditions for confinement of plasma with ~1015 cm−3 density and high ion temperature, and also for macroscopically stable system “electron beam - plasma” was carried out in the new configuration of facility. As a result of the experiments the plasma with density of (1-2)·1015 cm−3, neTe+niTi =(0.5-2)·1015 keV/cm3 and confinement time of 100-200 microseconds in a multimirror trap is obtained. The observations of high ion temperature and mechanism of ion heating is discussed in the paper.
