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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.
Yuzhong Jin, Wei Zhao, Christopher Watts, James P. Gunn, Guangwu Zhong, Xiang Liu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 2 | February 2019 | Pages 120-126
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2018.1520577
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An all-welded ITER divertor Langmuir probe (DLP) model was analyzed by ANSYS 17.0. Temperature field and surface convective heat transfer were obtained by fluid analysis using ANSYS/CFX under both steady-state (10 MW/m2) and slow transient-state (20 MW/m2 for 10 s) working conditions. Mechanical analysis was performed with the temperature field as the preloading condition. The equivalent von-Mises stress and plastic strain distribution have been obtained. The analyzed results show that the DLPs would withstand very high temperature, which can reach 1852°C mainly owing to the extremely high heat flux as well as photon irradiation. The maximum temperature of the copper connection between the DLP and the monoblock would be 792°C, demonstrating that the bonding structure would not be destroyed. All the materials except the alumina pipe have undergone plastic yield analysis, implying that a low cycle strain-fatigue analysis needs to be done in the near future.