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NRC issues draft EA/FONSI for Duane Arnold restart
Efforts by NextEra Energy to restart the Duane Arnold nuclear power plant as early as 2029 continue to move forward with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's preliminary environmental assessment and determination that the restart would have no significant environmental impacts.
On Thursday, the NRC posted a draft environmental assessment and a finding of no significant impact for the Palo, Iowa, facility; the Federal Register notice was published on Monday. The Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing is a cooperating agency on the draft EA, as the DOE is considering providing financial assistance to the restart project.
Nathan Nicholas, Bryce Shaffer
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 3 | April 2020 | Pages 366-372
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1712988
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Over the past decade, Air Squared has been actively developing and improving the highly anticipated 15 m3/h tritium vacuum pump to replace the obsolete industry standard Normetex scroll pump. The all-metal pump features a metal bellows that hermetically seals all tritium gas from any material other than metal. Air Squared has listened to the tritium market’s needs and is currently developing the latest addition to the Air Squared tritium vacuum pump line: the 150 m3/h liquid cooled all-metal (LCAM) scroll vacuum pump. Through numerous hours of testing, Air Squared has demonstrated the advantages of LCAM scroll vacuum pumps. The effect that thermal expansion has on highly toleranced all-metal pumps has been observed and characterized to predict pump performance as well as provide safe operational temperature limits. Performance characteristics of the 15 m3/h pump have been analyzed with different process gases to understand the effects of pumping light gases. Vacuum pumping speed curves have been generated at various interstage pressures to understand the advantages that roughing pump systems have when used in series with all-metal scroll vacuum pumps. This paper presents Air Squared’s 15 m3/h designs and highlights the performance characteristics. The effects that pump temperature, process gas, and fore-vacuum have on all-metal scroll vacuum pumps are explained with empirical data collected over a decade of research. With the knowledge and data collected, Air Squared has a pathway for a new industry standard 15 m3/h and 150 m3/h positive displacement scroll pump for tritium service to support international nuclear fusion and tritium research.