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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.
Shanwen Zhang, Yuntao Song, Zhongwei Wang, Xuebing Peng, Jianfeng Zhang, Yongfa Qin, Linlin Tang, Qiang He
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 73 | Number 1 | January 2018 | Pages 43-49
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1368334
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X), the largest modular stellarator in the world, is in operation at Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald, Germany. The magnet system of the W7-X consists of 50 nonplanar and 20 planar superconducting coils, which are supported by a massive central support structure. All superconducting coils have been subjected to gravity and electromagnetic force due to the interaction between self-field and the coil current in the test conditions in Saclay, France. Each coil is equipped with a few mechanical sensors. Some of the sensors have indicated considerable deviation from the numerical prediction. The nonplanar coil Type 1 is an example of such deviations. This technical note presents structural analyses performed to verify the numerical modeling by checking the stresses in the measurement points. In order to find the reason from the finite element model, three factors are considered: mesh refinement, increasing the region of mesh refinement, and changing the element supports. The results show that the three factors have no impact on the stresses at the measurement points. Finally, special attention has been paid to the sensors during commissioning of the W7-X, which revealed that lack of information about boundary conditions or temperature fluctuations could be the reason for the original discrepancies.