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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.
S. Murakami, H. Yamada, M. Sasao, M. Isobe, T. Ozaki, T. Saida, P. Goncharov, J. F. Lyon, M. Osakabe, T. Seki, Y. Takeiri, Y. Oka, K. Tumori, K. Ikeda, T. Mutoh, R. Kumazawa, K. Saito, Y. Torii, T. Watari, A. Wakasa, K. Y. Watanabe, H. Funaba, M. Yokoyama, H. Maassberg, C. D. Beidler, A. Fukuyama, K. Itoh, K. Ohkubo, O. Kaneko, A. Komori, O. Motojima, LHD Experimental Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 46 | Number 2 | September 2004 | Pages 241-247
Technical Papers | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A561
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Confinement of energetic ions from neutral beam injection heating is investigated by changing the magnetic field configuration of the Large Helical Device from a classical heliotron configuration to an optimized neoclassical transport configuration to a level typical of "advanced stellarators." The experimental results show the highest count rate of fast neutral particles not in the optimized configuration but in the inward-shifted one. The GNET simulation results show a relatively good agreement with the experimental results, and they also show a lower energy loss rate in the optimized configuration. This contradiction can be explained by the radial profile of the energetic ions. The relatively good agreement between experimental and simulation results suggest that ripple transport (neoclassical) dominates the energetic ion confinement and that the optimization process is effective in improving confinement in helical systems.
