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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.
Yasunori Iwai, Yuki Edao, Rie Kurata, Kanetsugu Isobe
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 5 | July 2019 | Pages 399-404
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1600932
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A detritiation system (DS) is required to remove tritium from the atmosphere of a nuclear containment in any extraordinary situations. Realization of a DS that does not require heating of a catalyst reactor for tritium oxidation and frequent switching operation of adsorption columns for tritiated vapor collection will greatly contribute to the improvement of fusion safety. Concerning the catalyst reactor, it has been demonstrated that tritium can be oxidized at room temperature without any heating by the developed hydrophobic catalyst. To achieve a high tritium conversion efficiency for detritiation, it has already been revealed that suppression of production of tritiated hydrocarbons by hydrogenation reactions as side reactions of tritium oxidation in a catalyst reactor is the key issue to be solved. We have to pay special attention to ethylene among hydrocarbons because ethylene is easily tritiated by reaction of hydrogenation. In this study, complete combustion of ethylene at room temperature in the catalyst reactor is proposed as a measure to suppress the formation of tritiated hydrocarbons. Catalytic combustion characteristics of hydrocarbons were obtained, and the change in the ignition temperature by a change in each design parameter of the catalyst was demonstrated. Concerning noble metal species, platinum is superior to palladium due to less susceptibility to water vapor. The smaller the particle size of noble metal is, the higher the activity is, but because it is more susceptible to water vapor, the particle size of noble metal can be optimized. It was suggested that there is an optimum value for the pore size of the catalytic support.