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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.
T. Numakura, T. Cho, J. Kohagura, M. Hirata, R. Minami, K. Yatsu, S. Miyoshi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 43 | Number 1 | January 2003 | Pages 222-224
Stability | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A11963599
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The effects of the thermal-barrier potentials ɸb on the central-cell electron energy confinement are theoretically and experimentally investigated in the GAMMA 10 tandem mirror. In particular, the scaling of the central-cell electron temperatures Te with “the central-cell electron-confining potentials” ɸb is studied on the basis of the electron energy-balance equation and the generalized Pastukhov theory. The obtained theoretical scaling of Te with ɸb is then compared with the experimentally observed relation between these two parameters. In GAMMA 10, the main tandem-mirror operations are characterized in terms of(i) a high-potential mode having kV-order plasma-confining potentials, and (ii) a hot-ion mode yielding fusion neutrons with 10-20 keV bulk-ion temperatures. In this report, the scaling of Te with ɸb covering over these two representative operational modes is investigated, since the scalings of Te or the dominant parameters which determine Te have been remained for a long time as an unresolved important issue for tandem-mirror plasmas. It is found that the data in the two representative operational modes of the high-potential and hot-ion modes in the GAMMA 10 tandem mirror are in good agreement with the theoretically derived scaling formula, though the heating-source parameter dependence in the electron energy-balance equation is quite different in the two modes.
