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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.
T. Bernat, C. Castro, J. Hund, A. Pastrnak, N. Petta, J. Sin, O. Stein
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 73 | Number 3 | April 2018 | Pages 392-399
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1406250
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Thin polyimide (PI) windows are used to contain gases in a variety of targets including National Ignition Facility ignition targets. Magnetized liner inertial fusion targets shot on the Sandia National Laboratory Z-facility and on the University of Rochester OMEGA laser facility typically contain deuterium gas in the pressure range from a few to as many as 15 atm, with the window diameters ranging from a few tenths of a millimeter at OMEGA to several millimeters at the Z-facility. These pressures are generally higher, with larger plastic deformations, than previously investigated. We have fabricated and assembled PI windows and measured their deflections and burst pressures for these pressure and diameter ranges at room temperature. The results are dependent on PI formulation and the details of the window assembly geometry. We analyze the scaling behavior of these higher-pressure windows similarly to but with an extension of the analysis of Bhandarkar et al. [Fusion Sci. Technol., Vol. 70, p. 332] and show that predictions of pressure-induced deflection using this analysis applies to a more complex window geometry than previously reported.