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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.
Sergey Pestchanyi, Francesco Maviglia
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 7 | October 2019 | Pages 647-653
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1643684
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Simulation of divertor target damage during thermal quench of the disruption in the future DEMO tokamak has been performed using the TOKES code. This parametric study includes damage estimation for disruptions of the plasma energy E0 in the DEMO core in the range of 0.4 to 1.3 GJ and of time duration 1 to 2 ms. According to the simulations, the maximum melt depth on the divertor targets is ~80 μm, independent of the energy content in the core. The melted pool maximum area grows from ~20 m2 for 0.4-GJ disruption to ~120 m2 for 1.3-GJ disruption. Maximum erosion depth is 4 μm for 1.3-GJ disruption and decreases to less than 1 μm with decreasing E0. The total quantity of vaporized tungsten ranges from 2 ∙ 1021 to 3 ∙ 1024 atoms for disruptions of 0.4 to 1.3 GJ. An additional parametric study has revealed weak dependence of the results from the characteristic widths λq of the disruptive flux in the scrape-off layer.
