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Latest News
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. Omoya, L. C. Bai, H. Takeno, Y. Yasaka, Y. Nakashima
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 2 | February 2009 | Pages 114-117
Technical Paper | Seventh International Conference on Open Magnetic Systems for Plasma Confinement | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A6994
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In D-3He fusion, most of fusion energy is carried by kinetic energy of created protons of 14.7 MeV. Concept of traveling wave direct energy converter (TWDEC) was proposed as an effective energy converter with less handling voltage. Although fundamental researches on TWDEC have been reported, the dependence on energy spread of flowing ions has not been investigated in spite of its significant effects against conversion efficiency. The paper treats this subject by an application of TWDEC simulator to GAMMA 10 tandem mirror whose end-loss flux has relatively wide energy spread. The energy distribution of the end-loss flux was measured, and a new structure of TWDEC simulator was designed according to the measured result. The conversion efficiency was estimated by one-dimensional numerical orbit calculations showing the designed structure had enough performance as TWDEC.
