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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.
Yasunobu Arikawa, Yuki Iwasa, Kohei Yamanoi, Keisuke Iwano, Shinsuke Fujioka, Akifumi Iwamoto, Mitsuo Nakai, Yuji Hatano, Masanori Hara, Satoshi Akamaru, Takayoshi Norimatsu, Ryosuke Kodama
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 4 | May 2020 | Pages 464-470
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1716458
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In inertial confinement fusion (ICF), a fuel target containing deuterium and tritium is used. In recent ICF experiments on the Gekko XII LFEX facility at the Institute of Laser Engineering at Osaka University (ILE-Osaka), a target comprised of a polystyrene capsule filled with D2O liquid and a solution of X-ray tracer materials, such as copper, titanium, or chlorine, was developed. In this study, an additional T2O doping technique by which tritium can be mixed uniformly has been developed. The T2O is synthesized by T2 gas using a CuO oxidation catalyst. The T2O is agglutinated by cold trap and transferred to a target cell in which a D2O-solution-filled target is placed. Because polystyrene is slightly permeable for T2O and D2O, D2O is exchanged by T2O and completely mixed. Thus, a uniform tritium-doped ICF target with various materials can be fabricated. The T2O synthesizing and doping system is developed and tested using H2 as a cold run. The H2O is successfully doped to a D2O prefilled target at approximately 50% doping. This scheme will be utilized in future fast ignition experiments at ILE-Osaka.
