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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. A. Rasmussen et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 753-757
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Plasma Engineering, Heating, Current Drive, and Control | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A776
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The ITER burning plasma and advanced operating regimes require robust and reliable heating and current drive and fueling systems. The ITER design documents describe the requirements and reference designs for the ion cyclotron and pellet fueling systems. Development and testing programs are required to optimize, validate and qualify these systems for installation on ITER.The ITER ion cyclotron system offers significant technology challenges. The antenna must operate in a nuclear environment and withstand heat loads and disruption forces beyond present-day designs. It must operate for long pulse lengths and be highly reliable, delivering power to a plasma load with properties that will change throughout the discharge. The ITER ion cyclotron system consists of one eight-strap antenna, eight rf sources (20 MW, 35-65 MHz), associated high-voltage DC power supplies, transmission lines and matching and decoupling components.The ITER fueling system consists of a gas injection system and multiple pellet injectors for edge fueling and deep core fueling. Pellet injection will be the primary ITER fuel delivery system. The fueling requirements will require significant extensions in pellet injector pulse length (~3000 s), throughput (400 torr-L/s,) and reliability. The proposed design is based on a centrifuge accelerator fed by a continuous screw extruder. Inner wall pellet injection with the use of curved guide tubes will be utilized for deep fueling.
