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NRC issues draft EA/FONSI for Duane Arnold restart
Efforts by NextEra Energy to restart the Duane Arnold nuclear power plant as early as 2029 continue to move forward with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's preliminary environmental assessment and determination that the restart would have no significant environmental impacts.
On Thursday, the NRC posted a draft environmental assessment and a finding of no significant impact for the Palo, Iowa, facility; the Federal Register notice was published on Monday. The Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing is a cooperating agency on the draft EA, as the DOE is considering providing financial assistance to the restart project.
Youji Someya, Kenji Tobita, Hiroyasu Utoh, Nobuyuki Asakura, Yoshiteru Sakamoto, Kazuo Hoshino, Makoto Nakamura, Shinsuke Tokunaga
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 2 | September 2015 | Pages 423-427
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-101
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We have considered a strategy for reducing the radioactive waste generated by the replacement of in-vessel components, such as blanket segments and divertor cassettes, for the fusion DEMO reactor. In the basic case, the main parameters of the DEMO reactor are a major radius of 8.2 m and a fusion power of 1.35 GW. Blanket segments and divertor cassettes should be replaced independently, as their lifetimes differ. A blanket segment comprises several blanket modules mounted to a back-plate. The total weight of an in-vessel component is estimated to be about 6,648 ton (1,575, 3,777, 372, and 924 ton of blanket module, back-plate, conducting shell, and divertor cassette, respectively). The lifetimes of a blanket segment and a divertor cassette are assumed to be 2.2 years and 0.6 years, respectively, and 52,487 tons of waste is generated over a plant life of 20 years. Therefore, there is a concern that the contamination-control area for radioactive waste may need to increase due to the amount of waste generated from every replacement. This paper proposes a management scenario to reduce radioactive waste. When feasible and relevant, back-plates of blanket segment and divertor cassette bodies (628 ton) should be reused. Using the three-dimensional neutron transportation code MCNP, the displacement per atom (DPA) of the SUS316LN back-plates is 0.2 DPA/year and that of the F82H cassette bodies is 0.6 DPA/year. Therefore, the reuse of back-plates and cassette bodies would be possible if re-welding points are arranged under neutron shielding. We found that radioactive waste could be reduced to 20 % when tritium breeding materials are recycled. Finally, we propose a design for the DEMO building that uses a hot cell and temporary storage.