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Getting back to yes: A local perspective on decommissioning, restart, and responsibility
For 45 years, Duane Arnold Energy Center operated in Linn County, Ia., near the town of Palo and just northwest of Cedar Rapids. The facility, owned by NextEra Energy, was the only nuclear power plant in the state.
In August 2020, a historic derecho swept across eastern Iowa with winds approaching 140 miles per hour. Damage to the plant’s cooling towers accelerated a shutdown that had already been planned, and the facility entered decommissioning soon after, with its fuel removed in October of that year. Iowa’s only nuclear plant had gone off line.
Today the national energy landscape looks very different than it did just six short years ago. Electricity demand is rising rapidly as data centers, artificial intelligence infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, and electrification expand across the country. Reliable, carbon-free baseload power has become increasingly valuable. In that context, Linn County has approved the rezoning necessary to support the recommissioning and restart of Duane Arnold and is actively supporting NextEra’s efforts to secure the remaining state and federal approvals.
S. Kobayashi, T. Shimizu, Y. Seki
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 15 | Number 2 | March 1989 | Pages 1008-1012
Safety And Environment — II | doi.org/10.13182/FST89-A39825
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
If a loss-of-coolant accident occurs in a fusion reactor, the temperature in the vacuum vessel will rise. If the decay heat is not removed, then the plasma vacuum boundary may melt. In this paper, the effects of the decay heat in a LOCA are analysed numerically based on the Fusion Experimental Reactor (FER). ... the fusion power: ∼ 460 MW. In the case of a loss-of-coolant accident with the plasma shut down, it is assumed that the decay heat is removed by the radiation of the divertor only. If the radiant effect is a quarter of the black radiation, the divertor plate will not melt, because the temperature rise is less than 150 K. Secondly, it is assumed that the decay heat is removed by the radiation between the outer shield and the heat shield. When the initial shield temperature is low and the amount of the shield is large, the temperature rise is negligible, because the heat capacity is large enough to absorb the heat. The effect of the natural convection outside of the cryostat is negligible to remove the heat.