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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.
L. Z. Liang, J. L. Wei, S. Liu, Y. H. Xie, C. C. Jiang, W. Liu, J. J. Pan, Y. J. Xu, Z. M. Liu, Y. L. Xie, C. D. Hu, Y. Z. Zhao
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 2 | February 2019 | Pages 160-165
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2018.1533619
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In order to meet experimental requirements on high parameter plasma research, the injected power of the counter injector is expected to increase at a fixed beam energy of 50 keV for deuterium neutral beam. Three candidate schemes are compared to assess the possibilities of raising the injected power. Considering safety and economic factors, raising the electric field in the first gap is employed by adjusting the voltage gradient on the accelerator. The experiments show that the optimum perveance is increased from 2.2 to 2.7 μP by changing of gradient grid voltage from 0.84 to 0.78 Vacc. The ion beam power is promoted by about 50% at 3.0 μP, but beam transmission efficiency decreased to 60% at 3.0 μP. Thus, the injected power is boosted about 25%.
