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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.
J. Knaster et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 685-689
ITER | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8988
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Toroidal Field (TF) system of ITER consists of 18 coils with design nominal current of 68 kA operating in steady state mode that provides 5.4 T in the plasma centre. The winding pack (WP) of each coil is formed by 7 stacked double pancakes which are connected between them in the coil lower region, sharing space with the current leads, supercritical Helium cooling piping and manifolds. The TF coils of ITER are not nuclear safety related, but the release of the 41 GJ of magnetic energy in a controlled way in case of a quench and the difficulties of replacing a failing TF coil make a reliable coil instrumentation design essential as investment protection.The present paper describes not only the principles of the primary and secondary quench detection system of the ITER TF coils but also the operation monitoring instrumentation. The reliability of strain gauges, temperature sensors, pressure gauges and flow meters in the cryogenic environment and high electromagnetic noise environment is also discussed.
