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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
Alexander Mlynek, Gabriella Pautasso, Marc Maraschek, Horst Eixenberger, ASDEX Upgrade Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 4 | May 2012 | Pages 290-300
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13582
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this paper, we describe recent measurements with the ASDEX Upgrade two-color CO2/HeNe interferometer in which a time resolution of 200 ns was obtained in the density measurement by digitizing the 40-MHz raw signals of the interferometer at 500 million samples/s and performing density reconstruction by software. It is illustrated that this high resolution is beneficial during massive gas injection for disruption mitigation, as it allows for the discovery of fast density oscillations in the frequency range from 200 kHz to [approximately]1 MHz, which shows clear correlation to magnetic measurements.