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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.
Raghavan Jay Jayakumar
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 46 | Number 2 | September 2004 | Pages 225-233
Technical Papers | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A559
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Achieving high performance for long duration is a key goal of advanced tokamak research around the world. To this end, tokamak experiments are focusing on obtaining (a) a high fraction of well-aligned noninductive plasma current, (b) internal transport barriers (ITBs) in the ion and electron transport channels over a wide radial region with transport approaching neoclassical values, and (c) control of resistive wall modes and neoclassical tearing modes that limit the achievable beta. A current profile that yields a negative central magnetic shear (NCS) in the core is consistent with this focus; NCS is conducive for obtaining ITBs, a high degree of bootstrap current alignment, and reaching the second stability region for ideal ballooning modes, while being stable to ideal kink modes at high beta with wall stabilization and neoclassical tearing modes in the core NCS region. Much progress has been made in obtaining advanced performance in several tokamaks through an increasing understanding of the stability and transport properties of tokamak plasmas. Radio-frequency and neutral beam current drive scenarios are routinely developed and implemented in experiments to access new advanced regimes and control plasma profiles. Short-duration and sustained ITBs have been obtained in the ion and electron channels. The formation of an ITB is attributable to the stabilization of ion and electron temperature gradient and trapped electron modes by the negative shear and by the enhanced E × B flow shear rate and rarefaction of resonant surfaces near the rational qmin values. The progress in understanding the underlying physics in such plasmas and the development of techniques and technology would be of interest in stellarator efforts.
