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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.
B. Pégourié, A. Géraud, Tore Supra Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 3 | October 2009 | Pages 1318-1333
Technical Papers | Tore Supra Special Issue | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A9180
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Particle control is an essential requirement for long-pulse operation. Besides steady-state particle exhaust, the complementary key element is particle fueling. Three fueling methods are currently used in Tore Supra: conventional gas puffing, supersonic molecular beam injection, and pellet injection. In addition to a technical description of the corresponding systems, this paper presents an overview of different studies characterizing these methods in terms of fueling efficiency and ability to fuel long discharges or to obtain high-density plasmas with no confinement degradation. An analysis of the interaction between the plasma and the pellet or supersonic beam is also given, including the physics of the homogenization of the deposited particles in the background plasma (importance of the edge cooling and of the [nabla]B-induced displacement) or the transport-induced modification for deep-matter penetration (triggering of an improved confinement phase or, conversely, of a sawtooth crash when a pellet crosses the q = 1 surface).
