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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.
Lin Hu, Karl D. Hammond, Brian D. Wirth, Dimitrios Maroudas
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 1 | January 2017 | Pages 36-51
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST16-105
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We report the results of a systematic atomic-scale analysis of small helium cluster dynamics near a Σ3<111>{121} symmetric tilt grain boundary (GB) in tungsten based on molecular-dynamics simulations according to a reliable interatomic interaction potential. We find that small, mobile helium clusters (Hen, 1 ≤ n ≤ 7) in the near-GB region are attracted to the GB due to an elastic cluster-GB interaction force. Moreover, as the clusters drift toward the GB, cluster trap mutation (TM) reactions in the near-GB region are activated at rates much higher than those in the bulk of the material’s grains. This near-GB cluster dynamics has significant effects on the near-GB defect structures and the amount of helium retained in the material upon plasma exposure. Each TM reaction generates a tungsten vacancy, which traps helium by forming an immobile helium-vacancy complex, and an interstitial tungsten atom in the form of an extended tungsten interstitial complex on the GB. This interstitial configuration is characterized by mobility that depends on the location where the TM reaction occurs: It is immobile when the vacancy produced by the TM reaction is located a few lattice planes away from the GB plane and highly mobile along a specific direction when the produced vacancy is located on the GB. The latter mechanism initiates a potentially fast migration path for W atoms along the GB toward a free surface, which may influence significantly the surface morphology of plasma-exposed tungsten.