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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.
Bin Chen, Jiangang Li, Yanlan Hu, Teng Wang, Chao Zhou
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 2 | February 2020 | Pages 95-101
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1690927
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
High-temperature superconductor (HTS) current leads are important components of the EAST and CFETR tokamaks, which are responsible for operating the high parametric current. HTS current leads are made of Bi-2223/Ag-Au alloy tapes, which have the characteristics of slow quench propagation speed and weak quench signal. Traditional thermometers are easily damaged by the high voltage from the current leads, and the terminal voltage signal cannot reflect the hot spot changes of current leads in real time. In this paper, a novel quench detection method based on optical frequency domain reflection technology is proposed. Temperature variations of HTS can be obtained in real time by demodulating the Rayleigh scattered spectrum from the distributed optical fiber attached to the surface of HTS stacks. This paper describes a quenching experiment for one pair of 1-kA small current leads. The external thermal disturbance is increased to explore the quench propagation of HTS current leads under the condition of a self-field, 77 to 80 K air and conduction combined cooling method. From the experimental results, the temperature distribution map of the whole HTS lead is obtained. Compared with the quench voltage, the spectral shift of the fiber appeared to be about 2 s ahead, and the hot spot position can be located with 1-cm accuracy.
