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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.
Wilfred Anthony Cooper, Sergi Ferrando i Margalet, Simon J. Allfrey, Johann Kißlinger, Horst F. G. Wobig, Yoshiro Narushima, Shoichi Okamura, Chihiro Suzuki, Kiyomasa Y. Watanabe, Kozo Yamazaki, Maxim Yu. Isaev
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 46 | Number 2 | September 2004 | Pages 365-377
Technical Papers | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A576
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The impact of the bootstrap current is investigated on the equilibrium properties of a two-period quasi-axisymmetric stellarator reactor with free boundary and on the corresponding ideal magnetohydrodynamic stability properties. Although the magnetic field strength B spectrum is dominated by a m/n = 1/0 component, the discrete filamentary coils trigger some small-amplitude symmetry-breaking components that can disturb the quasi-symmetry of B. Finite causes the plasma column to shift outward in the absence of bootstrap current. With a self-consistent bootstrap current in the 1/ regime, the plasma becomes more elongated and more distorted in the horizontally elongated up-down symmetric cross section. At [approximately equal to] 3.25%, the plasma can be restored to its near-vacuum shape with the application of a vertical field with coil currents 20% of those of the modular coils, but at the expense of a significant mirror component in the B-field spectrum. The bootstrap current causes the rotational transform profile to increase above the critical resonant value (c = 1/2 for 1.1%) and combines with the Pfirsch-Schlüter current to destabilize a m/n = 2/1 external kink mode for 1.8%.
