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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.
P. A. Bagryansky et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 1 | January 2005 | Pages 59-62
Technical Paper | Open Magnetic Systems for Plasma Confinement | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A608
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
At present, the GDT facility is being upgraded. The first stage of the upgrade is the Synthesised Hot Ion Plasmoid (SHIP) experiment. It aims, on the one hand, at the investigation of plasmas which are expected to appear in the region of high neutron production in a GDT based fusion neutron source proposed by the Budker Institute and, on the other hand, at the investigation of plasmas the parameters of which have never been achieved before in axisymmetric magnetic mirrors.The experiment is performed in a small mirror section which is installed at the end of one side of GDT. The magnetic field on axis is in the range of 0.5-2.0 Tesla and the mirror ratio is 1.2-1.4. The mirror is filled with background plasma streaming in from the central cell. This plasma component is maxwellised and has an electron temperature of about 100 eV. Two neutral beam injectors perpendicularly inject a total current of about 50 Atom Amperes of deuterium neutrals with an energy of 20 keV as a pulse with a duration of about 1 ms. Ionisation of the beams generates the high-energy ion component. The device has been equipped with several diagnostic methods which are successfully used in GDT experiments.The paper presents first results of plasma parameter measurements in SHIP experiment.
