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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.
Rodrigo Antunes, Laëtitia Frances, Marco Incelli, Alessia Santucci
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 3 | April 2020 | Pages 257-261
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1705748
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the reference technologies for the fuel cycle of fusion machines is Pd/Ag membranes. This technology is proposed to be implemented in tritium recovery systems because of their exclusive selectivity toward molecular hydrogen isotopes (Q = H, D, T). To perform scaling-up studies for the Tritium Extraction and Removal System of the European DEMOnstration fusion power reactor (DEMO) with a solid blanket, a one-dimensional simulation code was recently developed and successfully validated with experiments. This code relies on different operational (e.g., feed pressure and temperature), geometrical (e.g., permeator length), and membrane-intrinsic (e.g., Q2 permeability) parameters given as input. The main outcome is the Q2 permeation efficiency, defined as the Q2 permeate–to–feed flow ratio. Because of the low concentrations of Q2 expected at the He stream purging the solid blanket, the surface effects are expected to be important, decreasing the separation efficiency of the Pd/Ag permeators. In this paper the role of surface effects on the permeation efficiency is studied for a DEMO-relevant scenario (feeding mixture: HT/H2/He). Moreover, a sensitivity study is also given demonstrating the high impact of the permeation area, temperature, and feed pressure on the permeation efficiency of HT.
