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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.
Erzhong Li, H. Zhao, X. Liu, T. Zhou, Q. Cao, A. Ti, Y. Liu, L. Hu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 1 | January 2019 | Pages 67-74
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2018.1499394
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work is motivated by the measurement of electron dynamics during edge-localized modes (ELMs) which is observed as electron cyclotron emission (ECE) bursts at edge. Considering a small optical thickness for both background and energetic electrons at the edge, detailed physical design and analysis of the ECE spectrum have been done when energetic electrons are considered at edge as in this technical note. The assembly of a portable eight-channel heterodyne radiometer is based on the building-block idea to conveniently adjust radio frequency components to suit for tokamak toroidal fields. Tests were performed in the 2016 Fiscal Year Campaign of Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) for demonstrating the ability of the system. Specifically, the bursting ECE in combination with the calculated spectrums indicates that the energetic electrons survive in the pedestal region and shift outward during the growing phase of an ELM.