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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.
Masanori Hara, Miki Shoji, Tsukasa Aso
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 3 | April 2020 | Pages 163-169
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1661720
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Liquid scintillation counters (LSCs) have been widely used for low-level tritium measurements. To obtain an accurate tritium activity using a LSC, a quenching correction is required. The quenching occurs from interruptions to the scintillation process (chemical quenching) and by absorption of scintillation photons by colored substances (color quenching). There is no common method for the correction of color quenching. Here, two-dimensional (2-D) scintillation spectra were measured with a conventional LSC connected to an external multichannel analyzer. The LSC had two photomultiplier tubes (PMTs). A 2-D spectrum was constructed from pulse heights from both PMTs. In a less-quenching cocktail, the 2-D scintillation spectra extended along a 45-deg line. However, the shape of the spectrum broadened with increasing color quenching and thus gave information about the color quenching. The effect of color quenching was qualitatively less significant in the relationship between the tritium counting efficiency and the quenching index parameter.