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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.
K. Nam et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 2 | August 2013 | Pages 131-135
ITER | 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/FST13-A18067
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper describes the fabrication of removable panel for ITER cryostat thermal shield (CTS) and its conduction cooling test at cryogenic temperature. Two kinds of full-scale mock-ups of the removable panels have been developed, depending on different thermal conduction designs. Passive cooling characteristics of the mock-ups are investigated with the measured data of temperature jump at the joint and maximum temperature at the panel. The passive cooling of panel with copper insertion satisfies the design requirement of temperature jump (< 3 K), even though the heat load condition in the cooling test is more severe than the design condition of CTS. It is clearly demonstrated that the copper strips bonded on the panel attenuate the temperature gradient of the panel. Different thermal behaviors at the joint are also found for the two mock-ups.