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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.
Jie Li, Jie Zhang, Yang Qiu, Liangliang Zhang, Changle Liu, Xiang Gao
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 1 | January 2020 | Pages 70-77
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1610320
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The breeding material ratio (BMR) makes a significant impact on the tritium breeding ratio (TBR) to the fusion blanket due to the material fraction influence inside the blanket interior. The qualitative study on the BMR-related TBR issues are focused on the two cases of water-cooled blanket modules: the mixture blanket structure and the multilayer blanket case. The study indicates that TBR is a unique value in accordance with one BMR value in the mixture blanket. Moreover, a systematic scheme on TBR estimation based on multiple variable combinations is carried out for the multilayer model. It is found that the blanket local TBR would vary along with BMR increasing, and that high TBRs are obtained at BMR in the range of 0.08 to 0.12 for the two cases. In particular, the maximum TBR occurs when the BMR is in the range of 0.09 to 0.1. Furthermore, TBR variation due to BMR change induced by blanket macrofactors, like material type, material ratio, material structure, etc., is defined using the universal function solution. These results would be more important to the breeding blanket design and optimization since they would affect the blanket structure concepts and their TBR estimations. Hence, the blanket BMR issues are important concerns on the road toward an advanced blanket system for the Chinese Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) at the present pre-engineering stages.
