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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.
J. T. Scoville, M. L. Walker
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 774-778
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Plasma Engineering, Heating, Current Drive, and Control | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A780
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Modern tokamaks are highly sophisticated devices consisting of a large number of state-of-the-art systems that must function in unison to obtain a successful plasma discharge. An unsuccessful discharge can result if one or more systems fail, and diagnosis in an efficient and timely manner can be difficult. The resulting reduction in tokamak availability and productivity can be expensive, justifying a significant effort for automated fault diagnosis.For the DIII-D tokamak, a software system has been used for the past 5 years to automatically monitor and test the performance of hundreds of tokamak systems. The Fault Identification and Communication System (FICS) is automatically triggered to run immediately after each tokamak discharge and report its results via a simple color-coded graphical user interface. In addition to saving the operator time, the significant advantage of FICS is its ability to detect insipient faults that could lead to future machine failures. It has been estimated that FICS has saved an average of one to two shots per day, which equates to approximately 5% of all DIII-D pulses. The significant experience gained through the development and use of this post-discharge analysis tool also provides insight into future methods for on-line process monitoring of steady state devices