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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.
D. van Houtte
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 8 | November 2019 | Pages 1064-1075
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1658042
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The systems engineering process starts with the discovery of the real issues that need to be resolved and the identification of failures that are the most probable or/and have the highest negative impact during the life cycle of a project. Systems engineering involves finding mitigations to these most critical problems. This logic is fully followed in reliability, availability, maintainability, inspectability (RAMI) engineering. Although this area is at its beginning in fusion technologies, a few years ago the ITER Organization developed an approach to assess the RAMI requirement of systems. As an example of what a RAMI analysis can bring to the maintainability and thus operational availability of a nuclear fusion facility like ITER, the availability of the cask and plug remote handling system in charge of handling of port plugs and their moving between the port cells to the hot cell facility is addressed in the case of diagnostic equatorial port plugs.