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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.
Lauren M. Garrison, Yutai Katoh, Josina W. Geringer, Masafumi Akiyoshi, Xiang Chen, Makoto Fukuda, Akira Hasegawa, Tatsuya Hinoki, Xunxiang Hu, Takaaki Koyanagi, Eric Lang, Michael McAlister, Joel McDuffee, Takeshi Miyazawa, Chad Parish, Emily Proehl, Nathan Reid, Janet Robertson, Hsin Wang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 6 | August 2019 | Pages 499-509
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1602390
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The United States and Japan have collaborated on fusion materials research in a series of agreements reaching back to 1981. The PHENIX collaboration is the latest U.S.-Japan project which spans 2013 to 2019 and has the goal of assessing technical feasibility of tungsten-based, helium-cooled plasma-facing component concepts for a demonstration fusion power reactor (DEMO). Task 2 within the PHENIX project is focused on evaluating the neutron irradiation effects in tungsten. For tungsten, the transmutation to Re and Os is at least as important to determining its properties after irradiation as the displacement damage, and the transmutation rate depends on the energy spectrum of the reactor. A large-scale, instrumented irradiation capsule with thermal neutron shielding to better mimic fusion conditions was irradiated in the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The tungsten specimens were irradiated in different temperature zones between 500°C and 1200°C to doses of ~0.2 to 0.7 displacements per atom. More than 20 varieties of pure tungsten and tungsten alloys were included in the irradiation, and they were evaluated in the 3025E hot-cell facility and at the Low Activation Materials Development and Analysis Laboratory. The elevated temperature tensile, fracture toughness, hardness, thermal conductivity, electrical resistivity, density, elemental composition, and microstructure properties of the irradiated materials are being collected. This paper overviews the experimental design, specimen matrix, and the initial results of postirradiation examinations.