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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.
Ph. Mertens, S. Brezinsek
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 2 | February 2005 | Pages 161-171
Technical Paper | TEXTOR: Plasma-Wall Interactions | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A697
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The detailed physical mechanisms of hydrogen recycling are not yet completely clear. But, their understanding is required for the correct interpretation of spectroscopic measurements that are intended to provide us routinely with the total particle fluxes as well as with sound extrapolations to fusion devices of the next generation. Thanks to its large observation ports, TEXTOR provides ideal conditions for the combination of optical diagnostics based on completely different techniques, which can be applied simultaneously, with high resolving powers (/ = 2 × 104 to 2 × 105).It is shown how Zeeman spectroscopy on the Balmer-alpha transition (656.1 nm) and laser-induced fluorescence at Lyman-alpha (121.5 nm) both point to the presence of a substantial amount of cold hydrogen atoms (with kinetic energy <1 eV) in front of plasma-facing components, which is a phenomenon that, surprisingly, is largely independent of the local plasma parameters. This has led to a strong development of the spectroscopy of hydrogen molecules (Fulcher band), which may be a dominant source of atomic hydrogen in the plasma edge, and, as a final result, to an explanation for the phenomenological correction applied to the inverse photon efficiencies S/XB that are commonly used in the conversion of the photon fluxes into particle fluxes.