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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.
Yukihisa Ueno, Takahito Tomizawa, Yasushi Yamamoto
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 4 | May 2005 | Pages 1295-1298
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Nonelectric Applications | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A868
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In recent researches, an assisted glow discharge experiment using an external ion source has been tried to reduce operation gas pressure. As results, operating gas pressure has been successfully reduced from 1.5 Pa to 0.3 Pa, and the neutron production rate has increased.These results are considered to be due to an increase of ion energy. However, it is necessary to measure the ion energy distribution of the Cylindrical Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Fusion (C-IECF) device in order to confirm this. To do this, we have measured the distribution of the neutral particle beam energy (relative to ion energy distribution). These experimental results demonstrate that a decrease of operation gas pressure (from 1.7 Pa to 0.3 Pa) contributes to the increase in ion energy.
