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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.
Neil Mitchell, Denis Bessette, Hirobumi Fujieda, Yuri Gribov, Cees Jong, Fabrice Simon
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 676-684
ITER | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8987
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The ITER magnet system, particularly the Poloidal Field Coils (PFC) and Central Solenoid Coils (CSC), was originally designed to drive, confine and stabilise a set of plasmas about a baseline of a reference 15MA 400s inductive burn, with capability for inductive short burn at currents up to 17MA and 10MA non-inductive plasmas depending on the plasma parameters that can be achieved.Recent assessments of experimental data and improved plasma modelling have identified some constraints in the 2001 design that may limit the range of plasmas that can be generated in ITER. The constraints are a mixture of coil superconducting performance, structural and electrical limits, and concern both the accuracy of the formation of the plasma configuration (including the position of the separatrix lines in the divertor) and the stabilisation of the plasma position.
