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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.
D. Reiter, M. Baelmans, P. Börner
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 2 | February 2005 | Pages 172-186
Technical Paper | TEXTOR: Plasma-Wall Interactions | doi.org/10.13182/FST47-172
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The EIRENE neutral gas transport Monte Carlo code has been developed initially for TEXTOR since the early 1980s. It is currently applied worldwide in most fusion laboratories for a large variety of different purposes. The main goal of code development was to provide a tool to investigate neutral gas transport in magnetically confined plasmas. But, due to its flexibility, it also can be used to solve more general linear kinetic transport equations by applying a stochastic rather than a numerical or analytical method of solution. Major applications of EIRENE are in connection with plasma fluid codes, in particular with the various versions of the B2 two-dimensional plasma edge fluid code. The combined code package B2-EIRENE was developed, again initially for TEXTOR applications, in the late 1980s. It too has become a standard tool in plasma edge science. It is currently mainly used for divertor configurations, such as by the ITER central team, to assist the design of the ITER divertor. Both the EIRENE and B2-EIRENE concepts are introduced and illustrated with sample applications.