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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.
Tao Lin, Dequan Liu, Lijun Cai, Qiang Li, Laizhong Cai, Tao Qiao
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 73 | Number 1 | January 2018 | Pages 68-74
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1372679
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The HL-2M tokamak, which is being built at the Southwestern Institute of Physics, is considered one of the most important short-pulse devices for future fusion research in China. The design criterion of the HL-2M specifies the demountable joints for the toroidal field coils (TFCs) due to the assembly requirements. A horizontal preload is needed to keep a good electrical conductance for the joint of each coil. In order to assure the appropriate preload to be exerted on the TFCs under different operation conditions and to provide the preload at 40 locations simultaneously, the horizontal preload system of the HL-2M tokomak has been developed. In this technical note, the design of this system is presented in detail. Finite element analysis is applied to evaluate the design. To validate the assembly and the performance, a prototype of the actuator has been manufactured and tested to finalize the design for fabrication.
