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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.
A. Ekedahl, M. Goniche, D. Guilhem, F. Kazarian, Y. Peysson, Tore Supra Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 3 | October 2009 | Pages 1150-1172
Technical Papers | Tore Supra Special Issue | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A9172
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Since the mission of Tore Supra is to produce quasi-steady-state discharges, the lower hybrid current drive (LHCD) system constitutes the most important method of additional heating and noninductive current drive. A description of the LHCD system is given, including the different launcher designs developed for the Tore Supra long-pulse program. Following the completion of the Composants Internes et Limiteur project, together with the installation of a high-performance LHCD launcher, world record discharges, injected and extracted energy exceeding 1 GJ, were obtained in 2003. With the flexibility of lower hybrid (LH) waves to tailor the current profile, an enhanced performance regime, the so-called LHEP, has been maintained in quasi-steady-state discharges. Detailed measurements of the fast electron distribution have allowed us to constrain LHCD ray-tracing models and to quantify parametric dependencies describing the fast electron tail. Localized heat loads on the LHCD launchers due to interaction with fast particles have been measured and quantified, using infrared imaging and calorimetric measurements on water-cooled plasma facing components. Furthermore, experimental results in the area of LH wave coupling are presented.
