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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.
Jiarong Fang, Peter Titus, Dang Cai, Han Zhang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 8 | November 2019 | Pages 823-827
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1622972
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Both PF1A upper coils and lower coils experienced difficult situations during the National Spherical Torus Experiment–Upgrade (NSTX-U) machine operations in 2016. There are huge up-down electromagnetic forces on PF1A terminals, coil leads, and bus bars. Therefore, further analysis and additional reinforcement supports are needed to reduce the stress on the coil terminals and leads. Structural, thermal, and electromagnetic analyses of the three-dimensional PF1A lower bus bar and coil lead model have been performed using imported electromagnetic loads with the worst cases of 96 scenarios through the global Biot-Savart stick model. The reinforcement blocks for the PF1A lower coil leads and flags and two clamps were analyzed and installed for field testing. The coil leads and bus bars used in the field testing were qualified for the normal NSTX-U operating loads allowing similar reinforcement details to be used in the real NSTX-U machine.