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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.
V. S. Chan, R. D. Stambaugh, A. M. Garofalo, M. S. Chu, R. K. Fisher, C. M. Greenfield, D. A. Humphreys, L. L. Lao, J. A. Leuer, T. W. Petrie, R. Prater, G. M. Staebler, P. B. Snyder, H. E. St. John, A. D. Turnbull, C. P. C. Wong, M. A. Van Zeeland
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 57 | Number 1 | January 2010 | Pages 66-93
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A9269
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The objective of the Fusion Development Facility (FDF) under consideration is to carry forward advanced tokamak physics for optimization of fusion reactors and enable development of fusion's energy applications. A concept of FDF based on the tokamak approach with conservative expressions of advanced physics and nonsuperconducting magnet technology is presented. It is envisioned to nominally provide 2 MW/m2 of neutron wall loading and operate continuously for up to 2 weeks as required for fusion nuclear component research and development. FDF will have tritium breeding capability with a goal of addressing the tritium self-sufficiency issue for fusion energy. A zero-dimensional system study using extrapolations of current physics and technology is used to optimize FDF for reasonable power consumption and moderate size. It projects a device that is between the DIII-D tokamak (major radius 1.8 m) [J. L. Luxon, Nucl. Fusion, Vol. 42, p. 614 (2002)] and the Joint European Torus (major radius 3 m) [P. H. Rebut, R. J. Bickerton, and B. E. Keen, Nucl. Fusion, Vol. 25, p. 1011 (1985)] in size, with an aspect ratio A of 3.5 and a fusion gain Q of 2 to 5. Theory-based stability and transport modeling is used to complement the system study and to address physics issues related to specific design points. It is demonstrated that the FDF magnetohydrodynamic stability limits can be readily met with conservative stabilizing conducting wall placement. Transport analysis using a drift-wave-based model with an edge boundary condition consistent with the pedestal stability limit indicates that the FDF confinement requirement can also be readily satisfied. A surprising finding is that the toroidal Alfvén eigenmodes are stabilized by strong ion Landau damping. Analysis of vertical stability control indicates that the basis configuration with an elongation x [approximately] 2.35 can be controlled using a power supply technology similar to that used in DIII-D. Peak heat fluxes to the divertor are somewhat lower than those of ITER [R. Aymar, P. Barabaschi, and Y. Shimomura, Plasma Phys. Control. Fusion, Vol. 44, p. 519 (2002)], but FDF will operate with a higher duty factor.
