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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.
C. Gormezano, P. Buratti, M. L. Apicella, E. Barbato, G. Bracco, A. Cardinali, C. Castaldo, R. Cesario, S. Cirant, F. Crisanti, M. de Benedetti, B. Esposito, D. Frigione, L. Gabellieri, E. Giovannozzi, G. Granucci, H. Kroegler, M. Leigheb, M. Marinucci, D. Pacella, L. Panaccione, V. Pericoli-Ridolfini, L. Pieroni, S. Podda, F. Romanelli, M. Romanelli, P. Smeulders, C. Sozzi, A. A. Tuccillo, O. Tudisco
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 45 | Number 3 | May 2004 | Pages 303-322
Technical Paper | Frascati Tokamak Upgrade (FTU) | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A516
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The main physics results achieved in the recent years in the Frascati Tokamak Upgrade (FTU) are reviewed. The main focus of research has been the development of performance plasmas at high densities (up to 4 × 1020 m-3), high magnetic field (up to 8 T) and plasma current (up to 1.6 MA), that are therefore in a domain of relevance for burning physics experiments such as ITER. The main tools consist in the development of plasma conditioning techniques and the use of various electron heating and current drive systems. Improved confinement regimes have been developed, including (a) the production of steady electron internal transport barriers at high density and electron temperature (up to central electron temperature of 11 keV at a central density of 0.9 × 1020 m3), (b) the production of repetitive pellet enhanced plasma modes with deep pellet deposition leading to a substantial increase of the neutron yield (and a record FTU value of the fusion product niTiE up to 0.8 × 1020 m-3 keVs), and (c) the production of radiation improved modes at high magnetic field. Main results on the supporting physics program will also be given in the domain of plasma wave physics (lower hybrid current drive, electron cyclotron resonance frequency, ion Bernstein waves), heat and impurities transport, and magnetohydrodynamic studies.
