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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.
A. Khodak, C. Kessel, M. Tillack
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 8 | November 2019 | Pages 930-938
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1643689
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Liquid metal (LM) plasma-facing components (PFCs) have the potential to alleviate some of the difficult constraints of solid PFCs. The solid substrate that supports these liquids would see only neutron irradiation and is protected from the plasma. Lithium or lithium eutectics would have a high affinity for tritium and deuterium at low operating temperatures and would provide a low recycling environment for the core plasma that seems to provide significant confinement improvements in existing plasma experiments. Liquid metals have sufficient thermal conductivity for good thermal conduction and can provide vapor shielding under transient heat loads. On the other hand, electrically conducting liquids will have magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) interactions that can disturb the surface allowing material to enter the plasma and can laminarize the flow, thereby reducing turbulence and convective heat transport. Sputtering and evaporation must be controlled by limiting the operating temperature. The substrate material must remain covered to survive, and the design for how the LM enters and exits the plasma chamber or divertor region needs to be identified. The present contribution introduces a liquid lithium free-surface cooling system into a future fusion device design developed for the Fusion Nuclear Science Facility (FNSF) program. The design includes LM PFCs covering convex divertor surfaces as well as lithium supply and removal lines. Three-dimensional analysis of the proposed design was performed using a highly customized version of the ANSYS CFX code applying methods of computational fluid dynamics. MHD was introduced using a magneto vector potential approach, allowing a natural interface. Free-surface flow was included using a volume of fluid approach with surface tension on the fluid vacuum interface. Electromagnetic equations were solved for LM as well as for solid components and vacuum. Special stabilization procedures were derived and applied to improve the convergence of the momentum equations with the source terms due to Lorentz force and surface tension. Conjugate heat transfer analysis was performed in LM and solid components. The numerical model was validated using analytical MHD solutions for high Hartmann number flow as well as relevant experimental results. Numerical solutions were obtained for the design configuration including FNSF geometry and Fusion Energy System Studies device parameters obtained from the system studies. Results of the analysis allow determination of the parameter range for the operation of the proposed design as well as design optimization.