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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.
M. Aquilini, L. Baldi, P. Bibet, R. Bozzi, A. Bruschi, R. Cesario, S. Cirant, C. Ferro, F. Gandini, S. di Giovenale, G. Granucci, T. Fortunato, G. Maddaluno, F. de Marco, G. Maffia, A. Marra, V. Mellera, F. Mirizzi, V. Muzzini, A. Nardone, A. Orsini, M. Papalini, P. Papitto, V. Pericoli-Ridolfini, P. Petrolini, S. Petrosino, S. Podda, G. L. Ravera, G. B. Righetti, M. Roccon, F. Santini, M. Sassi, A. Simonetto, C. Sozzi, N. Spinicchia, A. A. Tuccillo, P. Zampelli
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 45 | Number 3 | May 2004 | Pages 459-482
Technical Paper | Frascati Tokamak Upgrade (FTU) | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A525
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
High-frequency wave systems with high-power density launching capability have been the preferred choice to heat the Frascati Tokamak Upgrade (FTU) because of physics arguments (electron heating at very high density) and space constraints from the compactness of the machine design (8-cm-wide port). They do include an 8-GHz lower hybrid current drive (LHCD) system, a 140-GHz electron cyclotron resonance heating (ECRH) system, and a 433-MHz ion Bernstein waves system (IBW). The technical aspects of these systems will be reviewed in this article. The main features of the design include the following: (a) a very compact conventional LHCD grill with a compact window to keep the vacuum on 48 (12 columns, 4 rows) individual waveguides allowing the maximum flexibility in spectra generation to be achieved; power handling up to [approximately equal to]10 kW/cm2 has been achieved, (b) ECRH launchers designed as a quasi-optical system (implementing ITER relevant solutions) retaining the maximum flexibility in the equatorial launcher (poloidal/toroidal steerability) to exploit a variety of scenarios, (c) a two-waveguides launching array making the IBW experiment on FTU unique. Other technical aspects (sources, transmission lines, etc.) are also reviewed. The development of a new ITER relevant lower hybrid launcher, the passive active multijunction, is described.
