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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.
Kieran J. McCarthy, Maria A. Ochando, Francisco Medina, Bernardo Zurro, Carlos Hidalgo, Maria de los Angeles Pedrosa, Ignacio Pastor, Jesús A. Herranz, Alfonso Baciero
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 46 | Number 1 | July 2004 | Pages 129-134
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A548
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A fine-grained mobile pyrolytic graphite limiter was biased to generate radial electric fields in the plasma edge region of the TJ-II stellarator to improve confinement operation modes. Indeed, for the range of voltages applied (up to ±300 V), spectroscopic data indicate that limiter biasing does not induce significant external influxes of impurities. Also, after boronization of the vacuum chamber, increases of ~100% in electron density, together with reductions of the order of 40% in Zeff, are observed during limiter biasing. Here, we report on the first study of impurity behavior in the TJ-II during externally induced radial electric fields. For this, different spectroscopic methods were employed, and the results obtained were compared to assess impurity behavior and to evaluate the effectiveness of such biasing on plasma confinement in TJ-II.