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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.
Marco Riva, Christian Di Sanzo, Mohamed Abdou, Mahmoud Youssef
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 72 | Number 3 | October 2017 | Pages 469-477
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1333853
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Breeding blankets with integrated first wall are one of the most critical components of nuclear fusion reactors. Blankets breeding zones are characterized by steep nuclear heating gradients due to the exothermic nuclear reaction 6Li(n, )T and the high intensity neutron flux in the proximity of the first wall. Non-uniformity in nuclear heating can generate sharp temperature gradients that deeply affect material properties. This conceptual study explores an original way to flatten nuclear heating profiles by proposing a blanket characterized by layers of different 6Li enrichment in the breeder region while maximizing Tritium Breeding Ratio (TBR) and power generation. Two types of fusion blanket are studied: (1) Helium Cooled Ceramic Reflector (HCCR) and (2) Dual Coolant Lead Lithium (DCLL). For HCCR, it is found in the optimal design case, that the power peak-to-average can be reduced by 47.85%, 42.45% and 54.13% in the front, middle and back channel respectively when compared to the reference design. On the other side, we found that this method of profile flattening is not appealing for DCLL, under the geometrical configuration and material selection in this particular blanket design, since most of nuclear heating is caused by photon heat deposition.