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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. L. Duchateau, J. Y. Journeaux, B. Gravil
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 3 | October 2009 | Pages 1092-1123
Technical Papers | Tore Supra Special Issue | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A9170
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We review the main design choices for the toroidal field system and associated cryogenic system for Tore Supra, which introduced the use of 1.8K superfluid helium as coolant for a large NbTi magnet system. The main steps of the system commissioning are presented, with a description of the main difficulties encountered, showing the evolution of the monitoring and of the safety system to take into account the lessons drawn from the first operating experience.The impact of plasma operations such as plasma initiation, long plasma discharges, and disruption is given in detail, highlighting their impact on cryogenics, which remains in all cases weak. The fast safety discharges (FSDs) of the system can disturb normal operation. Origin of and statistics about FSDs are discussed, detailing efforts to decrease their number.Finally, maintenance and monitoring of the cryogenic system and of the various sensors are presented with some consideration regarding the aging of the system and its overall availability. Details are given regarding minor failures on components all along the operation. Overall, the accumulated experience is certainly a useful tool to prepare the manufacture and operation of the ITER superconducting magnets despite the differences in design and size.
