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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.
Sung Nam Lee, Nam-Il Tak
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 3 | April 2020 | Pages 238-245
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1705725
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The High-Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor (HTGR) has been selected as one of the next-generation nuclear power plants because of its passive safety features. The Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI) has been studying how to utilize HTGR efficiently and safely. The HTGR uses graphite as a moderator and helium as a coolant. Once tritium is produced, it is released into the coolant; once released from the core, tritium travels within the primary loop. Because the coolant is gas phase, it is easy to transport to other systems. While it circulates in the primary loop, tritium is involved in processes that include leakage, purification, and permeation. KAERI has been developing a tritium behavior analysis code named TRitium Overall Phenomena analYsis (TROPY) to analyze tritium transport and predict the amount of tritium in the loop in the HTGR core. In this paper, the functions of the TROPY code are introduced, and the amount of tritium in each loop and the amount released into the product hydrogen from the MHTGR 350-MW(thermal) core are explained.