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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.
Alice Ying, Hongjie Zhang, Joseph Mauricio Garde, Mike Ulrickson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 2 | August 2013 | Pages 309-314
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-A18095
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The impact of Be tile size on the stress exerted on the CuCrZr heat sink for the ITER EHF finger was examined. The study especially focused on the areas beneath the tiles that are exposed to the high convective heat flux. For reference, in a Be tile size of 50x50x8 mm3, the calculated equivalent strain range using elastic analysis for the path of interest through the side wall of the CuCrZr heat sink resulted in a peak value at the inner wall of ~0.492%. The corresponding fatigue lifetime of the heat sink locally is unacceptably low, 1400 cyclic operations. By using smaller tiles, lower stress amplitudes are observed due to a smaller deformation. In this paper, the total strain range under ITER projected pulsed operating conditions is analyzed for a range of Be tile sizes. The analysis model uses a complete pair of twin fingers as opposed to a sub-model of two tiles. The paper documents the calculated cyclic lifetime of the ITER EHF CuCrZr heat sink with respect to Be tile size and peak heat loads by evaluating the total strain range both from elastic and time independent elasto-plastic analyses for repeated cycle.
