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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.
Max Aker, Marco Röllig
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 3 | April 2020 | Pages 373-378
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1712989
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Beta-induced X-ray spectrometry (BIXS) is a promising method for activity monitoring of tritiated gas species. BIXS systems measure bremsstrahlung and characteristic X-rays generated by interactions of beta decay electrons with surfaces within the measurement chamber. BIXS and other highly sensitive methods such as ionization counting are limited in accuracy by the tritium memory effect, a preconditioning dependent background signal caused by the sorption of tritium on surfaces. In this work, different surface materials have been investigated aiming at reducing the tritium memory effect while providing a high bremsstrahlung yield. A modular BIXS setup was developed that allows the consecutive investigation of different measurement cells utilizing the same detector while protecting it from contamination during cell exchanges. An uncoated stainless steel cell was compared to cells coated with Au, Ir, Ti-W, Ti-Au-Al, and Ti-Au-Cu layer systems. The sample cells were repeatedly exposed to 1100 Pa of molecular tritium. The development of the resulting memory effect was measured during the evacuation between consecutive exposures. Additionally, the background signal decay was investigated in a long-term measurement after the last exposure. In this presentation, the measurement results of the relative tritium memory effect from various surfaces will be shown. The lowest memory effect was measured for the gold-coated sample cell, reaching a background signal equal to (0.83 ± 0.14)% of the signal during exposure after a total dosage of 21.33 × 104 Pa h.