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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.
T. N. Todd
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 2 | August 2013 | Pages 76-85
Keynote and Plenary - I | Proceedings of the Twentieth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE-2012) (Part 1), Nashville, Tennessee, August 27-31, 2012 | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-557
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Now that ITER is under construction, interest is increasing in the specification and design of the successor machine, a Demonstration Power Plant (DEMO), which in Europe is coordinated by the EFDA Power Plant Physics and Technology programme. This paper summarises the work carried out for EFDA in 2011-2012 on design issues pertinent to a pulsed version of DEMO, intended to be implemented with little or no extrapolation of technology available today. The work was carried out by the Euratom Fusion Associations CCFE, CEA, CRPP, ENEA and KIT, and in addition to a review of recent relevant literature addressed systems code analyses (pulse length vs. size), erosion of plasma facing components, thermomechanical fatigue in the blanket and first wall, a range of energy storage issues, and fatigue life improvements in Nb3Sn CICC superconductors.