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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.
Masoomeh Ghasemi, Jaeyoo Choi, Hyun-Goo Kang, Hyunchul Ju
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 4 | May 2020 | Pages 404-414
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1712994
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of design parameters for the scale-up of the depleted uranium (DU) bed. The actual DU bed chosen for this study has a DU loading of 1.86 kg for a tritium capacity of 70 g and is cylindrical in shape and equipped with copper foam to enhance internal heat transfer. Based on the reference DU bed geometry, three different scale-up bed geometries to increase the amount of DU loading up to 9.3 kg were designed under different aspect ratios for comparison purposes and simulated using a three-dimensional transient DU hydride model developed in our previous studies. The simulation results are compared in terms of the evolution of the DU hydride temperature and H/U atomic ratio during the DU hydriding process. This study helps to identify key design parameters (e.g., it is critical to scale up the DU bed geometry).