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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.
Haihua Zhao, Vincent A. Mousseau
Nuclear Technology | Volume 181 | Number 1 | January 2013 | Pages 184-195
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 14th International Topical Meeting on Nuclear Reactor Thermal Hydraulics (NURETH-14) / Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A15766
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents extended forward sensitivity analysis as a method to improve uncertainty quantification. By including the time step and potentially grid spacing as special sensitivity parameters, the forward sensitivity method is extended as one method to quantify numerical errors. Note that by integrating local truncation errors over the whole system through the forward sensitivity analysis process, the generated time step sensitivity information reflects global numerical errors. Discretization errors can be systematically compared against uncertainties due to other physical parameters. This extension makes the forward sensitivity method a much more powerful tool than other tools of its type to help uncertainty quantification. When the relative sensitivity of the time step to other physical parameters is known, the simulation is allowed to run at optimized time steps without affecting the confidence of the physical parameter sensitivity results. The time step forward sensitivity analysis method can also replace traditional time step convergence studies that are a key part of code verification, with much less computational cost. Two well-defined benchmark problems with manufactured solutions are utilized to demonstrate the method.