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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.
Kyeongmin Oh, Dowan Kim, Kisung Lim, Hyunchul Ju
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 4 | May 2020 | Pages 415-423
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1712995
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We present a three-dimensional (3-D) steam-methane-reforming (SMR) model consisting of a steam-reforming (SR) reactor, water gas shift reactor, preferential oxidation reactor, catalytic burner, heat exchangers, and balance of plant components. The mass and energy balance equations are derived considering the kinetic expressions of various SMR reactions and implemented in the commercial computational fluid dynamics software program Fluent by employing user-defined functions. The 3-D SMR model is then applied to a 10-kW SR reformer geometry and simulated for comparison with in-house experimental data. The simulation results and the experimental data show good agreement, and the model accurately captures the experimental exhaust gas compositions and the reactor outlet temperatures. The proposed 3-D simulation tool for predicting various transport and chemical processes is highly desirable from the viewpoint of design and optimization of full-scale SMR-based fuel processors.