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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.
Lihua Zhou, Rui Vieira, Soren Harrison, Dan Karnes, Bruce Lipschultz
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 2 | August 2013 | Pages 293-297
Divertor and High-Heat-Flux Components | 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-A18092
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To design the Alcator C-Mod outer divertor to operate at 600°C and determine its effect on the surrounding vessel and diagnostics, heat transfer analysis must be performed. This paper describes the analysis and the results of heat transfer simulations of the outer divertor tiles, tile-mounting plate, support structure, and current shunt. Using Comsol, commercial FEA software package, a 3D wedge model that exploits the cyclic symmetry of the divertor, is created. By adjusting the power level of each of the 7 heaters used to elevate and control the divertor temperature, a uniform poloidal temperature distribution is achieved and the power requirements for the heaters are determined. The temperature of each component in the assembly is calculated, and results are used for further design changes. Additionally, radiation simulation on thermal shields are presented, which is used as ambient temperature for the heat transfer of the A-frame assembly. Furthermore, a full model of the entire outer divertor ring is presented with its toroidal temperature distribution. Finally, thermal stress of the plate is analyzed besides an analytical calculation of the maximum allowable temperature difference.