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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.
N. Hosogane, the JT-60 Team, JFT-2M Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 363-369
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Experimental Devices and Advanced Designs | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A717
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For steady state advanced tokamak research with long pulse operations, JT-60U tokamak discharge, NBI and RF heating injection durations have been extended from 15 s to 65 s and from 10 s to 30 s respectively mainly by means of modifying their control systems and using derated power levels. In addition, technological issues for their long pulse injections with the heating systems have been solved as follows. The ion source of the negative ion NBI system was modified to increase gas conductance in the accelerator, which reduced the heat load to the grounded grid due to stripping loss to a level that enables operations of 2 MW for 30 s. A new method of controlling the anode voltage has been developed for sustaining the oscillation condition of a gyrotron in the electron cyclotron (EC) system. With this method, the EC injection duration has reached 16 s at 0.4 MW. To avoid serious damage of the LH launcher, a heat-resistant carbon grill LH antenna was implemented on the original stainless steel grill. To date, the advanced tokamak operations have been extended to N = 2.1 for 20 s. In JFT-2M, high N plasmas had been investigated with the vacuum vessel covered with ferritic steels. N of ~3.5 was obtained with rwall/a~1.3-1.6 without serious influence of ferromagnetic walls (rwall is distance of the wall from a plasma center and a is minor radius of a plasma). This encourages the utilization of ferric steel as a structural material for future reactors.
