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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.
R. D. Deranian et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 768-773
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Plasma Engineering, Heating, Current Drive, and Control | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A779
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An extensive set of software tools for integrated plasma control, developed and validated on the DIII-D tokamak, has been applied to several nextgeneration fusion device designs including KSTAR, EAST, and ITER. These devices will require elements of integrated plasma control in order to achieve high reliability advanced tokamak or burning plasma operation. Plasma Control Systems (PCS) based on the DIII-D PCS have been designed for each of these devices. The integrated plasma control approach uses validated physics models to design controllers for plasma shape and both axisymmetric and nonaxisymmetric MHD instabilities and confirms control performance by operating actual machine control hardware and software against detailed tokamak system simulations. The physics-based models include conductors, diagnostics, power supplies, and both linear and nonlinear plasma models. These models can be implemented in the detailed control simulations to verify event handling and demonstrate functioning of control action under realistic hardware (CPU and network) conditions. Results of simulations are shown, illustrating control performance characteristics produced by each device design, engineering choices, and control system algorithms and hardware. Such simulations allow confirmation of performance prior to actual implementation on an operating device.