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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.
M. Zucchetti, Z. Chen, L. El-Guebaly, V. Khripunov, B. Kolbasov, D. Maisonnier, Y. Someya, M. Subbotin, R. Testoni, K. Tobita
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 5 | July 2019 | Pages 391-398
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1602457
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has been promoting the IEA Environment, Safety and Economic Aspects of Fusion Power program for many years. Among the tasks of this program, one task in particular deals with radioactive waste management in order to analyze the issue of the final destination of fusion activated and tritiated materials after their use in a fusion power reactor. A collaborative study on these aspects has been carried out in recent years. An optimized waste management strategy is proposed, with the goals of avoiding underground disposal as much as possible, maximizing recycling of activated materials within the nuclear industry, and/or clearance and release to commercial markets if materials contain only slight traces of radioactivity. Some technological problems and recent research advances in this field are summarized.