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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.
Kun Lu, Shijun Qin, Qingfeng Wang, Peng Liu, Xin Mao, Yang Zhang, Zhuang Xu, Zhihong Liu, Chen Liu, Jing Wei, Guang Shen, Sumei Liu, Yuntao Song, Jiefeng Wu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 1 | January 2020 | Pages 29-36
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1610319
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) is a new superconducting magnet tokamak. The vacuum vessel (VV) is one of the core components of the CFETR device, and it will provide a high-vacuum environment for the plasma, improve radiation shielding and plasma stability, and provide support for in-vessel components. The 1/8 VV sector mock-up has been designed and manufactured in the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Plasma Physics (ASIPP) from a few years ago to verify the design and key technologies to be used in the future. The production and assembly of the 1/8 VV sector are not in the same place, so lifting lugs and a support platform were designed for lifting and supporting the 1/8 VV sector mock-up. The detailed design of the 1/8 VV sector mock-up lifting lugs and support platform are described. There are two design options for the lifting lugs—removable and nonremovable—and there are also two design options—the integral and the separated—for the supporting platform. At the same time finite element analysis and assessment of the lifting lugs and supporting platform were done. The maximum stress does not exceed the allowable stress of the material, in consequence both of the two design options are practicable, respectively. All the design and analysis results will provide technical support for the assembly of the 1/8 VV sector in the future.