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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
S. O. Kucheyev, J. M. Lenhardt
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 73 | Number 3 | April 2018 | Pages 293-297
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1392205
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Liquid hydrogen confined in pores of nanofoams crystallizes at lower temperatures than in the unconfined, bulk state. Here, we summarize results of our recent systematic relaxation calorimetry studies of the liquid–solid phase transition of hydrogen and deuterium in various materials with open-cell pores. These include spinodal-decomposition-derived silica glasses and nanoporous gold, conventional silica aerogels, and carbon foams with ligaments made from nanotubes and graphene sheets, all of which were studied previously. We present new hydrogen thermoporometry data for polymeric norbornene-based aerogels. Results show that hydrogen freezing temperatures inside all the porous materials studied are depressed. The average depression of the freezing point scales linearly with the ratio of the internal surface area to the pore volume. The average freezing point depression is limited to ≲1.6 K for foams with monolith densities ≲50 mg·cm. Details of the freezing behavior, however, depend nontrivially on the choice of the porous material and on the hydrogen-filling fraction, reflecting phenomena that are beyond the Gibbs-Thomson formalism and pointing to the complexity of pore architectures in the low-density materials of interest to thermonuclear fusion energy applications.