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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.
Kun Jie Yang, Yue-Lin Liu, Ning Liu, Peng Shao, Xu Zhang, Yuming Ma
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 5 | July 2020 | Pages 616-631
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1740556
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We performed systematically first-principles calculations to investigate interstitial H diffusion/permeation of temperature dependence in tungsten (W). The interstitial H diffusion is primarily through two nearest-neighbor tetrahedral positions and its activation energy increases significantly with rising temperature. Phonon vibration plays a decisive role in the behavior of the H activation energy with rising temperature. The H permeation activation energy also depends strongly on the temperature since it is the sum of the formation energy and diffusion activation energy of H. Our calculated H diffusivity/permeability with the temperature agree quantitatively with the reliable experimental data within the error range in W. The vacancy-capturing effect can give a reasonable explanation of the discrepancy between simulation and experiment. Although the diffusion/permeation activation energy and the prefactor strongly depend on the temperature, the diffusivity/permeability of H still obeys quasi-Arrhenius behavior with rising temperature, which is attributed to the compensation effect between the activation energy and the prefactor, i.e., the increment of the prefactor compensates directly the modification of the diffusivity/permeability in the case of a variation in the activation energy with rising temperature.