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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.
Ku Young Chung, Chang Hyo Kim
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 151 | Number 2 | October 2005 | Pages 212-223
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE05-A2541
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
As an efficiency enhancement numerical scheme of transient nonlinear nodal calculations, a three-grid correction scheme (3GCS) using a modified W cycle based on three grid structures of three-dimensional (3-D) four-node-per-assembly (4N/A), 3-D 1N/A, and two-dimensional (2-D) 1N/A is developed. Its computational efficiency is compared with a single-grid biconjugate gradient stabilized (BICGSTAB) iteration scheme in popular use in terms of 3-D 4N/A nonlinear analytical nodal method solutions to Nuclear Energy Agency Committee on Reactor Physics pressurized water reactor rod ejection benchmark problems. It is shown that in computational efficiency, the 3GCS excels the BICGSTAB iteration method using preconditioners such as Jacobi, incomplete lower and upper (ILU), and 3-D block incomplete lower and upper (BILU3D) preconditioners. It is also shown that coarse-grid residual equations based on the 3-D 1N/A grid structure can predict temporal truncation errors as accurately as the 3-D 4N/A fine-grid residual equation but with considerably less overhead computing time for variable time-step size control calculations by a step doubling method. In addition, incorporation of preconditioners into the 3GCS is shown to enhance further efficiency of the nonpreconditioned 3GCS. From these results, it is concluded that the temporal adaptive 3GCS employing coarse-grid residual equations for temporal step-size control as well as the preconditioner like the BILU3D can provide a very efficient iterative solution scheme for transient nonlinear nodal calculations.
