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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.
Sandro M. O. L. Schneider, Patrick Burkhalter
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 4 | May 2020 | Pages 379-383
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1712990
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
When it comes to the task of handling gaseous tritium, the challenge is to reduce losses of this precious, gaseous, hydrogen isotope. The driving force to achieve this is based on three requests:
1. Improve the safety and efficiency by spotting losses of gaseous tritium.
2. Embed the real-time tritium monitoring in the process and safety automation.
3. Be transparent in the whole workflow for its own safety and for auditable compliance.
Many good and accepted single devices and working procedures have been proposed and used already.
By introducing the Smolsys Ltd.® Radio Medical Container (RMC) method, a team at Smolsys Ltd. has brought the efficient and safe handling of tritium to a new performance level. The idea of the RMC method is to combine many of those approved single devices for gaseous tritium handling and link the workflow logically and digitally in a well-controllable confinement. In the case of the RMC, the working space or room is a container in which the working places and machines are run; hence, the room itself becomes part of the production process and tritium machine. It is monitored and controlled by the process logic and as such becomes a smart and digitized RMC for more safety and efficiency in tritium handling. This paper presents the RMC based on a realized tritium-processing factory in Switzerland. This RMC is a fully engineered tritium facility with a designed and engineered safety factor and is very flexible to be customized. The RMC is also transportable since standard container sizes are used.