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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.
Kai Masuda, Tomoya Nakagawa, Taiju Kajiwara, Heishun Zen, Kiyoshi Yoshikawa, Kazunobu Nagasaki
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 523-527
Experimental Facilities and Nonelectric Applications | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8956
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion device driven by a ring-shaped built-in ion source is proposed and designed aiming at a reduced operating gas pressure in order to explore a possibility of a drastic enhancement in the fusion reaction rate in the envisaged beam-beam collision regime. In the present scheme ions will be extracted from a ring-shaped magnetron discharge plasma toward an IEC cathode grid placed concentrically at the center. A prototype ion source showed an accessible pressure of 5 mPa, which is hundreds times as low as the conventional glow-discharge-driven IEC. Dependence of the ion source current and extraction efficiency on the central IEC cathode voltage was studied by prototype experiments and numerical calculations. An IEC device with a built-in ion source was then designed based on these results. The expected IEC grid current is ~0.4 mA at 5 mPa, where observation of the beam-beam fusion contribution is anticipated.
