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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 Smolentsev, Thomas Rognlien, Mark Tillack, Lester Waganer, Charles Kessel
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 8 | November 2019 | Pages 939-958
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1610649
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Fusion Energy System Studies (FESS) Fusion Nuclear Science Facility (FNSF) project team in the United States is examining the use of liquid metals (LMs) for plasma-facing components (PFCs). Our approach has been to utilize an already established fusion design, FESS-FNSF, which is a tokamak-based machine with 518 MW fusion power, a 4.8-m major radius, a 1.2-m minor radius, and a machine average neutron wall loading of ~1 MW/m2. For this design, we propose a PFC concept that integrates a flowing LM first wall (FW) and an open-surface divertor. The flowing LM first removes the surface heat flux from the FW and then proceeds to the lower section of the vacuum chamber to form a large area LM surface for absorbing high peak surface heat flux in the divertor region. In pursuing the application of large open LM surfaces in the FNSF, two new computer codes have been developed and then applied to the analysis of free-surface magnetohydrodynamic flows and heat transfer, including fast thin flowing liquid layers over the solid FW (liquid wall), a tublike divertor, and a fast flow divertor. The analysis is aimed at optimization of the liquid wall design by matching certain proposed design criteria and also at evaluation of the maximum heat fluxes, using liquid lithium (Li) as a working fluid. It was demonstrated that the flowing Li FW (at ~2 cm and ~10 m/s) can tolerate a surface heat flux of ~1 MW/m2, while the open-surface Li divertor can remove a maximum high peak heat flux of 10 MW/m2. The paper also focuses on the underlying science. One such example is the evaluation and characterization of heat transfer mechanisms and heat transfer intensification in the tublike Li divertor.
