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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.
Jiaqi Chen, Caleb S. Brooks
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 5 | May 2023 | Pages 886-906
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2103347
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The axial-flow centrifugal bubble separator designed for the gaseous fission product removal system in liquid-fueled molten salt reactors is simulated using the Eulerian two-fluid model coupled with the Adaptive Multiple Size Group method to account for the significant coalescence and breakup in the bubble separator. The behavior of the gas core in the bubble separator is mimicked by the symmetric interfacial area concentration model. The separator efficiency, local velocity, and pressure profiles at various conditions are compared with experimental data. Good agreement is found between the experiment and the simulation for the separator efficiency. With the coalescence and breakup being accounted for, the effect of the inlet void fraction on the separator efficiency is correctly captured. For the local pressure and velocity profiles, the agreement is only quantitative due to the simplifications on the geometry and potential limitations of the current computational fluid dynamics models. As good agreement is found for the separator efficiency, the sensitivity study is performed for various operational and design parameters with further simplified two-dimensional axisymmetric simulation.