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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.
Mahmoud Bakr, Kai Masuda, Masaya Yoshida
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 6 | August 2019 | Pages 479-486
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1609821
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Neutrons are generated in the inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) device through different types of fusion reactions of the fuel gas such as deuterium (D) and tritium (T). Fusion in the IEC device takes place via various kinds of collisions like beam-beam collision, beam–background gas collision, and beam-target collision on the electrode surfaces. Two identical anodes for the IEC chamber made from titanium (Ti) and SUS-316L stainless steel (SS) are used to study the effect of the anode material on the neutron production rate (NPR). The NPRs from the chambers are measured at different applied powers. The achieved NPRs, so far, for Ti and SS are 8.9 × 107 n/s at 5.25 kW (75 kV, 70 mA) and 2.8 × 107 n/s at 10.5 kW (70 kV, 150 mA), respectively. The normalized NPR (NPR rated to the cathode current) from the Ti chamber is three to four times higher than that from the SS chamber. We observed a better NPR for the Ti chamber compared with the SS chamber. This is explained by the fusion reaction occurring between the neutrals and D atoms adsorbed/embedded on the inner surface of the anode. Moreover, the Ti chamber shows an improvement of the NPR as a function of the operating time ranging from 1.5 to 1.75 after 25 h from the first discharge.
