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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.
Kun Lu, Shijun Qin, Zhuang Xu, Yang Zhang, Guang Shen, Zhihong Liu, Chen Liu, Jing Wei, Sumei Liu, Yuntao Song, Jiefeng Wu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 3 | April 2019 | Pages 226-233
Regular Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2018.1555409
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The vacuum vessel (VV), one of the important components for the Chinese Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) superconducting magnet tokamak, can provide an ultrahigh vacuum and clean environment for plasma operation. The CFETR VV was preliminarily designed to be a torus with a D-shaped cross section, eight upper vertical ports, eight equatorial ports, and eight lower ports. In order to verify the design and key technologies to be used in the future, a 1/8 VV sector mock-up has been designed and fabricated at the Institute of Plasma Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (abbreviated ASIPP). In this paper, the mock-up is used to demonstrate thick austenitic stainless steel plate hot forming, welding, cutting, part segment assembly, and other technologies and developments. The design considerations and criteria of the 1/8 sector mock-up are discussed in detail. Based on these considerations, the main design parameters and characteristics of the 1/8 VV sector mock-up are described, including the inner shells, outer shells, and stiffening ribs between them and the straight line, arcs, and the tangential joint between them. Finally, the research and development of technologies for the mock-up manufacture that has been carried out at ASIPP is discussed.