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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.
Zhanlei Wang, Kaigui Zhu, Wei Wang, Yongchu Rao, Xiaoqiu Ye, Yakun Guo, Jing Yan, Chang An Chen
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 2 | February 2020 | Pages 102-109
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1693192
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Hydrogen isotope behavior in tungsten coated on reduced activation ferritic/martensitic (RAFM) steels such as China low activation martensitic (CLAM) steel has attracted more attention in the fusion engineering research community. This paper is mainly devoted to the investigation of the effect of tungsten coating on deuterium permeation and retention behavior in RAFM steels. The permeability and diffusion coefficients of CLAM, W-CLAM, and W were determined by gas-driven permeation (GDP) tests followed by thermal desorption spectroscopy to measure deuterium retention. It was found that the observed deuterium permeability and diffusivity of the composite W-CLAM specimen was reduced to about ~60% of the pure CLAM steel, whereas deuterium retention increased, evidently owing to the W coating on the surface that caused the slower release of D into the environment and increased of the effective surface area. In addition, a key finding was that the lath martensite–coarsened and more precipitate phase was found, which may be due to the migration of lath interface during the GDP test.