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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.
Seonghee Hong, Myunghyun Kim
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 6 | August 2019 | Pages 466-478
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1609820
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To enhance the practical application of a fusion-driven subcritical reactor, a system with constant fusion power by online feeding of molten salt fuel was designed. The system satisfies multiple purposes including waste transmutation, tritium breeding (TB), and energy multiplication (EM) through constant fusion power. All neutronic calculations were performed by SERPENT2.1.29 with the ENDF/B-VII.0 neutron cross-section library in order to simulate the online-feeding process.
A constant k-eff is maintained by the amount of the feeding being larger than the amount of the removed fission products. However, system performance is significantly improved by just reducting the reactivity swing with the feeding. Compared to a once-through cycle (OTC), the performance of TB and EM is significantly improved as the feeding rate increases. However, there is no deep burning effect like the OTC for waste transmutation.
The performance of waste transmutation is changed in the feeding scenarios. For the scenario with a high plutonium ratio, transmutation with plutonium is increased. On the other hand, for the feeding scenario with a high minor actinide ratio, transuranic waste is burned. However, the transmutation performance is degraded due to a low fission-to-capture ratio.
