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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.
G. J. van Rooij
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 57 | Number 2 | February 2010 | Pages 313-320
Edge Physics and Plasma-Wall Interactions | Proceedings of the Ninth Carolus Magnus Summer School on Plasma and Fusion Energy Physics | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A9422
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Linear plasma generators are widely used to study plasma surface interaction issues for fusion research. In this paper it is described why dedicated experiments for PSI are necessary and what the requirements are to reach the parameter regime relevant for ITER. An overview is given of some typical devices, particularly PISCES-B, PSI-2, Nagdis, Pilot-PSI, and the future device Magnum-PSI along with selected results to illustrate their capabilities.
