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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.
F. Sano, T. Mizuuchi, K. Nagasaki, H. Okada, S. Kobayashi, K. Kondo, K. Hanatani, Y. Nakamura, M. Nakasuga, S. Besshou, S. Yamamoto, M. Yokoyama, Y. Suzuki, Y. Manabe, H. Shidara, T. Takamiya, Y. Ohno, Y. Nishioka, H. Yukimoto, K. Takahashi, Y. Fukagawa, H. Kawazome, M. Kaneko, S. Tsuboi, S. Nakazawa, S. Nishio, M. Yamada, Y. Ijiri, T. Senju, K. Yaguchi, K. Sakamoto, K. Tohshi, M. Shibano, V. Tribaldos, F. Tabares, T. Obiki
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 46 | Number 2 | September 2004 | Pages 288-298
Technical Papers | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A567
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The H-mode transition properties of 70-GHz, 0.4-MW electron cyclotron heating (ECH) plasmas in Heliotron J have been studied with special reference to their magnetic configuration dependences, such as the edge iota dependences. Two edge iota windows for the H-mode transition were observed to be (a) 0.54 < (a)/2 < 0.56 in separatrix discharge plasmas and (b) 0.62 < (a)/2 < 0.63 in partial wall-limiter discharge plasmas if a certain threshold line-averaged electron density ([overbar]ne = 1.2-1.6 × 1019 m-3) is achieved, where (a) is the vacuum edge iota value and a is the plasma minor radius, respectively. A strong dependence of the quality of the H-mode on the edge topology conditions was revealed. The energy confinement time for the separatrix discharge plasmas was found to be enhanced beyond the normal ISS95 scaling in the transient H-mode phase, being 50% longer than that in the "before transition" phase. The window characteristics are discussed on the basis of the calculated geometrical poloidal viscous damping rate coefficient in a collisional plasma, indicating that the behavior of the viscous damping rate coefficient alone could not explain the observed characteristics. The bootstrap current properties of ECH plasmas and the relevant electron cyclotron current drive experimental results are also discussed.
