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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.
Yasuyuki Ogino, Keisuke Mukai, Juro Yagi, Satoshi Konishi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 6 | August 2019 | Pages 487-492
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1611343
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Measurement of neutron flux and energy spectrum profile inside the blanket is required for fusion blanket design. An experiment using an imaging plate and activation materials (Dy, In, and Au) was performed to measure spatial distribution of neutron flux. Neutrons were generated by a discharge-type compact fusion neutron source whose neutron production rate was more than 107 n/s. A linearity between the total number of active nuclides made by neutron and photo-stimulated luminescence per area on the activation material was confirmed for three orders of magnitude. The relationships between the total number of decay of activation in the materials and the flux of the neutron in a simplified breeder assembly was measured and compared with the computation by MCNP.
