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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.
F. Winterberg
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 2 | February 2020 | Pages 141-144
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1704573
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Taking into account Einstein’s general theory of relativity, a modification of Lockheed’s compact fusion reactor concept is proposed by replacing the two superconducting tori with rapidly rotating tori rotating in opposite directions. According to the general theory of relativity, two Coriolis force fields in opposite directions are set up, both of them having a negative mass density in their corotating reference systems, with a vanishing negative mass density in the center in between the rotating tori, where the hot fusion plasma is centered. Because of the Nernst effect going in the opposite direction, large toroidal currents are set up, repelling the hot plasma from the much cooler tori. This results in closed magnetic field lines for stable plasma confinement. The remaining problem, the removal of the heat released by neutron absorption in the metallic tori, can be resolved by a pulsed operation, axially injecting cool deuterium-tritium gas, from which the heat is externally removed by a radiator.