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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.
Paul R. Garabedian, Long-Poe Ku, the ARIES Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 400-405
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Experimental Devices and Advanced Designs | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A721
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The discovery of quasiaxially symmetric stellarators whose magnetic spectrum has approximate two-dimensional symmetry opens up the possibility of designing fusion reactors that have tokamak transport and stellarator stability. Prototypes with two or three field periods have asymmetries almost as small as the coefficients for a typical tokamak that are associated with ripple from the toroidal coils or helical excursion of the magnetic axis resulting from instability. We have found modular coils that are only moderately twisted and produce robust flux surfaces that do not deteriorate when changes are made in the magnetic field. This work is bolstered by recent stellarator experiments that have exceeded stability limits predicted by linear theory. The problem may be that force balance and stability are lost across islands if the equilibrium equations are not in conservation form.