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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.
Craig D. Beidler, Yuri L. Igitkhanov, Horst F. G. Wobig
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 46 | Number 1 | July 2004 | Pages 64-76
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A541
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The paper describes the electric field in stellarator equilibria and discusses the methods of how to compute the electric potential. The momentum balance in a given magnetic field including viscous and friction forces is considered in the frame of a multifluid model. A general ambipolar condition on closed pressure surfaces is derived that is still valid if magnetic surfaces do not exist. The need for an extended model originates from the singularities of the plasma current in the ideal magnetohydrodynamic model of stellarator equilibria, where parallel current density becomes singular leading to singular parallel electric fields. Viscosity and friction forces eliminate these singularities. The paper investigates the mathematical implications of the extended plasma model and discusses the existence of solutions using the methods of functional analysis.