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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.
Zongwei Wang, Qi Wang, Xuesen Zhao, Yong Hu, Dangzhong Gao, Jie Meng, Xing Tang, Xiaojun Ma
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 4 | May 2019 | Pages 308-316
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1565855
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Noncontact radiography is developed to determine the doping concentration of inertial confinement fusion shells based on an improved equivalent absorption method by real-time X-ray imaging. Elements of high atomic number (high-Z)/middle atomic number (mid-Z) are doped into the shells to prevent hot electrons from preheating the fuel and to restrain the growth of hydromechanic instability. In this paper, an improved equivalent absorption model is developed to determine doping concentration by real-time X-ray imaging. Compared to contact radiography (CR) with film imaging, this technique can be used to obtain doping concentrations at different angles as a supplement to the CR method, even if the dynamic range of a charge-coupled device is less than film imaging. Experiments are carried out to determine the doping concentrations of Ge-doped and Si-doped shells. Uncertainties of the results are analyzed, and the expanded uncertainties are approximated to 0.1 at. % (K = 2, confidence factor). The experimental results show that there is a high level of agreement between this method and energy dispersive spectroscopy with the modified model.