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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.
Kazuyuki Noborio, Yasushi Yamamoto, Satoshi Konishi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 4 | May 2005 | Pages 1280-1284
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Nonelectric Applications | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A865
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Using a 1-D particle code, we have analyzed characteristics of an Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Fusion device with external ion source which is added to enable low pressure operation. When the pressure becomes low, though neutron yield decreases, the decreasing amount is less than estimated from the decrease in background (target) gas density and it is confirmed that ions are accelerated efficiently with little energy loss through charge-exchange collision with background gas at low pressure. And when the pressure is lower than 0.05Pa, almost all injected ions reach to the cathode and it is expected that applying high geometrical transparency enhances accumulation of ion and enlarges neutron yield.