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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.
Y. C. Francis Thio, Scott C. Hsu, F. Douglas Witherspoon, Edward Cruz, Andrew Case, Samuel Langendorf, Kevin Yates, John Dunn, Jason Cassibry, Roman Samulyak, Peter Stoltz, Samuel J. Brockington, Ajoke Williams, Marco Luna, Robert Becker, Adam Cook
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 7 | October 2019 | Pages 581-598
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1598736
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Plasma-jet-driven magneto-inertial fusion (PJMIF) is the only embodiment of magneto-inertial fusion that has the unique combination of stand-off implosion and high implosion velocity (50 to 150 km/s). It uses inexpensive plasma guns for all plasma formation and implosion and has potential for a relatively high repetition rate from 1 to 2 Hz. Its configuration is compatible with the use of a thick liquid wall that doubles as a tritium breeding blanket as well as a coolant for extracting the heat out of the fusion reactor. The PJMIF operational parameter-space allows for the possibility of using a sufficiently dense target plasma for the target plasma to have a high . If such a high- plasma could be realized, it would help to suppress micro and magnetohydrodynamic instabilities, giving its target plasma classical transport and energy confinement characteristics. Its open geometry and moderate time and spatial scales provide convenient diagnostics access. Diagnostics accessibility, high shot rate, and low cost per shot should enable quick resolution of technical issues during development, thus the potential for enabling rapid research and development of PJMIF. There are a number of challenges for PJMIF, however, including being at a very early stage of development, developing the required plasma guns, dealing with potential liner nonuniformities, clearing the chamber of residual high-Z gas between shots, and developing the repetitive pulsed-power component technologies. Over the last 3 years, the development of the Plasma Liner Formation Experiment (PLX-) has been undertaken to explore the physics and demonstrate the formation of a spherical liner by the merging of a spherical array of plasma jets. Two- and three-jet merging experiments have been conducted to study the interactions of the jets. Six- and seven-jet experiments have been performed to form a piece of the plasma liner. A brief status report on this development is provided in this paper.