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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.
H. H. Lee, J. K Lee, W. H. Ko
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 7 | October 2020 | Pages 787-794
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1790712
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Charge exchange spectroscopy has been widely used in fusion devices to measure ion temperature, and toroidal and poloidal flow velocities of plasma. For local measurement, especially in the core region of the plasma, the spectrum emitted by the charge exchange reaction between the main plasma ions or impurity ions and the intentionally injected neutral beam should be analyzed so that parameters can be accurately deduced. Since the line-integrated spectrum signal through the line of sight of the diagnostic optics usually contains an unnecessary overlapped spectrum signal, referred to as the background signal, that typically originates from the plasma boundary region, a beam modulation technique is commonly applied to separate the background signal from the measured spectrum. Recently, it has been demonstrated in the KSTAR tokamak that a two-Gaussian fitting (TGF) method can be applied to analyze the spectrum and deduce plasma ion temperature and toroidal rotation velocity profiles of reasonable accuracy without beam modulation. It has been realized that the measurement result by the TGF method can be alternatively used to investigate plasma transport dynamics when beam modulation is prohibited to avoid any possible disturbance inhibiting robust plasma control and stable operation of the neutral beam injection system.