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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.
G. Giruzzi, C. Bourdelle, G. T. Hoang, F. Imbeaux, X. Litaudon, P. Maget, Y. Peysson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 3 | October 2009 | Pages 1381-1416
Technical Papers | Tore Supra Special Issue | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A9184
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Performing high-power long-duration discharges on Tore Supra has allowed us to investigate new physics at evanescent loop voltage in the situation where the current diffusion has fully taken place. Discharges with dominant noninductive current have been realized for many years, in a variety of configurations and plasma scenarios. They have allowed in-depth investigation on a number of physical phenomena governing the plasma behavior whenever the ohmic field is absent or negligible. The main results obtained in this area of research are summarized in this paper. They include, e.g., significant advances in the fast electron physics; the discovery of a new improved confinement regime (lower hybrid enhanced performance regime); the discovery of a new tokamak plasma regime with nonlinear temperature oscillations (O-regime); specific magnetohydrodynamic regimes associated with reversed safety factor profiles; investigation of the anomalous particle transport, obtained in vanishing loop voltage discharges; and the first experimental demonstration of synergy effects between electron cyclotron and lower hybrid current drive in a steady-state plasma.