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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.
C. Postolache, A. Antohe, C. S. Tuta, G. Bubueanu, M. R. Ioan
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 3 | April 2020 | Pages 202-208
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1704109
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Annual tritium exposures can be reconstructed for long time periods by analyzing radioactive concentrations in tree rings near nuclear facilities that can release tritiated water (HTO) to the environment. Since the mass of analyzed samples is on the order of milligrams, usual methods such as liquid scintillation counting cannot be applied. The recommended method comprises thermal decomposition of the milligram-sized samples, reduction of the resulting HTO to tritiated hydrogen, quantitative absorption of titanium hydride (TiHT) in titanium powder, and determination of the H/T ratio using an accelerator mass spectrometer method. This paper describes the method for obtaining TiHT standards with different H/T isotopic ratios for calibration of a mass spectrometer detector.