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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.
L. Fiasca, L. Boncagni, C. Centioli, F. Iannone, M. Panella, V. Vitale, L. Zaccarian
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 994-997
Plasma Engineering | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A9040
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Feedback control system running at FTU has been recently improved by the adoption of an Object-Oriented model, obtaining many advantages regarding the software extensibility, re-usability and testing capabilities. This new structure has been ported into a virtual environment using the QEMU processor emulator, in order to simulate, as close as possible to the hardware level, the control system behavior during the real experiment. This new approach introduces the advantage of decreasing dramatically the risks related to coding errors and operating system bugs arising at runtime, whereas it still supports the real-time control features. Moreover, the Real Time Workshop fast controller prototyping interface eliminates the model-translation related problems thanks to its automatic C code generation tools. The entire project flow is now completed: using Simulink, it is possible to design the diagram implementing a new control law, then synthesize the controller library. At this point, we can transfer the new library to the virtual machine, simulate the plasma control experiment in an open-loop configuration, and finally compare the simulation results to those from the past experiments, for a consistency check. The proposed framework is remotely managed by a new Matlab interface. After a satisfying simulation/validation of the new control model, the module can be easily transferred to the control system andhooked up to the real experiment, where it can operate in closed-loop. In this paper, we illustrate the advantages of this new approach and report on some experimental tests where the actual experimental data is compared to the simulations provided by the above-mentioned virtual environment.