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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.
Mitsuru Kambe, Masaki Uotani
Nuclear Technology | Volume 122 | Number 2 | May 1998 | Pages 179-195
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT98-A2861
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To enhance the inherent safety of the fast breeder reactor (FBR), unique attempts are being made in reactivity control systems design to achieve maintenance-free and reliable performance at the Central Research Institute of the Electric Power Industry. The design involves the lithium expansion module (LEM) for inherent reactivity feedback and the lithium injection module (LIM) for inherent ultimate shutdown. Reactor physics calculation revealed the reactivity worth of LEM and LIM in a 60-MW(electric), metal-fueled FBR and a 1000-MW(electric) mixed-oxide-fueled FBR. The system dynamics analyses revealed that LEM and LIM are effective to avoid sodium boiling in unprotected transient overpower and unprotected loss-of-flow transients. Reliability, maintainability, and real-time monitoring for LEM and LIM are also discussed.
