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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.
Kunihiro Sato, Hideaki Katayama
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 43 | Number 1 | January 2003 | Pages 299-303
Field Reversed Configuration and Neutron Sources | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A11963619
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Energy distribution of the 14.7MeV protons, which has energy spread of about 2 MeV due to the thermal motion of fuel ions, is derived analytically. Curvature drift of charged particles in an open magnetic field with a spiral configuration is estimated for separation of the 15MeV protons from thermal components. Numerical orbital calculation shows that amplitude of a wave about 1MV is necessary for trapping and deceleration of the proton beam in a traveling-wave direct energy converter (TWDEC). About 80% of the kinetic energy of the proton beam can be converted into electricity when bunching of the proton beam is improved by applying series of velocity modulations. Results of a computer simulation show that the TWDEC has desirable performance characteristics. The traveling wave with a designed frequency is excited spontaneously without any external power supply. The wave rapidly reaches an equilibrium state after loading, and stably responds to load fluctuations.