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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.
Tana Cardenas, Derek W. Schmidt, Eric N. Loomis, Randall B. Randolph, Christopher E. Hamilton, John Oertel, Brian M. Patterson, Kevin Henderson, Doug C. Wilson, Elizabeth Merritt, David Montgomery, William Daughton, Evan Dodd, Sasikumar Palaniyappan, John Kline, Steve Batha, Haibo Huang, Marty L. Hoppe, Michael Schoff, Neal Rice, Abbas Nikroo, Morris Wang, Richard Seugling, Donald Bennett, Steve Johnson, Carlos Castro
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 73 | Number 3 | April 2018 | Pages 344-353
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1406251
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The double-shell platform fielded at the National Ignition Facility requires developments in new machining techniques and robotic assembly stations to meet the experimental specifications. Current double-shell target designs use a dense high-Z inner shell, a foam cushion, and a low-Z outer shell. The design requires that the inner shell be gas filled using a fill tube. This tube impacts the entire machining and assembly design. Other intermediate physics designs have to be fielded to answer physics questions and advance the technology to be able to fabricate the full point design in the near future. One of these intermediate designs is a mid-Z imaging design. The methods of designing, fabricating, and characterizing each of the major components of an imaging double shell are discussed with an emphasis on the fabrication of the machined outer metal shell.