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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.
Masahiro Tanaka, Naoyuki Suzuki, Hiromi Kato, Chie Iwata, Naofumi Akata, Hiroshi Hayashi, Hitoshi Miyake
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 4 | May 2020 | Pages 475-480
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1718840
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a large fusion test facility, when a deuterium-plasma experiment is conducted a small amount of tritium is produced by the d(d, p)t reaction. From the viewpoints of radiation management and public acceptance, the tritium monitoring and recovery systems were developed and installed for the fusion test device. As for the tritium monitoring equipment, an expiratory test system of tritium was utilized for the internal dose assessment of workers. Active tritium samplers were operated continuously to monitor the amount of tritium released from the stack. As for the tritium recovery equipment, an exhaust detritiation system (EDS) for the plasma experiment has been developed and installed at the downstream of the vacuum pumping system in the fusion test device. All of the exhausted tritium from the vacuum vessel was treated by the EDS during the deuterium-plasma experimental campaign. Then, the tritium recovery rate achieved was more than 95%.