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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
D. L. Yu, S. Hacquin, C. Fenzi, P. Lotte
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 4 | November 2009 | Pages 1521-1528
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A9255
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A genetic algorithm (GA)-based method has been developed to analyze Charge-eXchange Recombination Spectroscopy (CXRS) data and provide in-between shot evaluation of the ion temperature profile during Tore Supra experiments. The GA method proposed here proves to be fast and fairly accurate, even when analyzing low signal-to-noise data. Simulations using theoretical signals suggest that the ion temperature and the plasma rotation velocity are expected to be determined with a precision better than 10% for a noise level up to 5% of the spectrum peak. The good agreement with the commonly used KS4FIT code when analyzing CXRS experimental data - typically within 30% for ion temperature measurements - confirms the efficiency of such an analysis tool.
