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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.
Michael McDonald, Armando Antoniazzi, Clive Morton
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 3 | April 2020 | Pages 194-201
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1704108
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Several types of radiological respiratory protective equipment (RPE) are used in tritiated environments at nuclear facilities and nuclear power plants to protect workers in those environments. It is crucial that the level of protection the RPE provides is well understood. A tritium protection factor (PF) may be assigned to RPE. The PF is often defined as the ratio of the tritium concentration in the ambient air to the tritium concentration in the breathing air. Field observations at Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) nuclear plants indicate that the in-use PFs are too conservative and do not represent actual internal uptakes following work in tritiated atmospheres. To improve radioactive work planning and work execution efficiency, more accurate tritium PFs are needed to cover the variety of personal radiological RPE currently in use. In order to test PFs of RPE, Kinectrics has designed, manufactured, and commissioned a tritium facility, referred to as the tritium exposure box (TEB), through support from the CANDU Owners Group. The TEB is a self-contained enclosure that permits the use of a full-sized mannequin with RPE for testing in a tritium oxide atmosphere. Tritium concentrations of up to 3.7 × 108 Bq/m3 may be achieved and maintained inside the TEB. The clean airflow to an air-supplied suit may range from 420 to 800 standard liters per minute. Following the successful commissioning of the TEB, Kinectrics has performed testing of an air-supplied plastic suit to determine the protection provided.