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Latest News
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, Takeshi Fujimoto, Tomoya Nakagawa, Heishun Zen, Taiju Kajiwara, Kazunobu Nagasaki, Kiyoshi Yoshikawa
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 528-532
Experimental Facilities and Nonelectric Applications | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8957
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A diagnostic method for spatial distributions of D-D and D-3He fusion reactions has been developed. Refinement of collimation geometry and choice of a detector and a shielding foil resulted in a drastic improvement of signal separation from noise in collimated proton counting. The developed method was then applied and revealed proton yield distributions in an inertial-electrostatic confinement device running with a D2-3He mixture fuel gas. The result showed localized D-3He reactions on cathode gird surfaces. It also indicated considerable fractions of D-D reactions on anode grid and chamber wall surfaces as well as the cathode grid.
