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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.
Hisamichi Funaba, Nobuyoshi Ohyabu, Yasuhiko Takeiri, Kiyomasa Watanabe, Shin Kubo, Takashi Shimozuma, Katsumi Ida, Junichi Miyazawa, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Kenichi Nagaoka, Kenji Tanaka, Byron Jay Peterson, Masaki Osakabe, Yoshio Nagayama, Shigeru Inagaki, Yoshiro Narushima, Satoru Sakakibara, LHD Experimental Group, Sadayoshi Murakami
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 46 | Number 2 | September 2004 | Pages 262-270
Technical Papers | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A564
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the low-density plasmas of the Large Helical Device, the shape of the electron temperature profile changes depending on the direction of the tangential neutral beam injection (NBI) when the magnetic axis position is inward-shifted at R = 3.50 m. Core flattening was observed in plasmas heated by counter-NBI. The electron thermal diffusivities in co-NBI and counter-NBI-heated plasmas are compared. The diffusivity becomes large at the central region in the case of counter-NBI. This result shows that the flattening in the electron temperature profile is not caused simply by a change in the power deposition only. Some magnetic fluctuations are seen during counter-NBI. On the other hand, it is a promising feature that the electron thermal diffusivity at the peripheral region does not increase with the heating power in co-NBI plasmas.
