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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.
Wei Zhao, Yali Wang, Yuzhong Jin, Li Zhao, Hongxia Zhou, Lin Nie, Guangwu Zhong, Chunjia Liu, Christopher Watts, James Paul Gunn
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 2 | February 2020 | Pages 79-87
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1674123
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The primary aim of the ITER divertor Langmuir probe system is to measure the plasma parameters at the divertor target plates. Saturation ion flux coming from the direct-current biased probe mode is used for advanced machine control, and the swept double-probe mode is recommended to measure electron temperature and density for physics studies. The design of the probe system includes three parts. First, tungsten Langmuir probes are mounted on the side of the target plates for collecting current from plasma, and thermomechanical simulation results show the design of the probe is robust and can survive under harsh working environments. Second, the electronics consists of the power supply, mode switching, and signal conditioning box and is used for driving Langmuir probes in different operation modes to obtain expected plasma information. Third, the functions of instrument and control include publishing configuration; monitoring and control; calibration; data acquisition; communication with the control, data access and communication (CODAC) system; and real-time ion flux measurement at the divertor target. The system design also complies with ITER’s technical practices, standards, and codes.