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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.
Z. W. Xia, W. Li, X. G. Liu, X. M. Huang, Y. D. Pan, S. Liu, T. Jiang, B. Li, S. Maruyama, Y. Yang, G. Kiss, U. Kruezi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 7 | October 2020 | Pages 848-856
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1817702
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The ITER gas injection system delivers gases from the tritium plant to the vacuum vessel, fueling pellet injection system, and neutral beam for plasma operation and fusion power shutdown. In this system, the gas fueling (GF) gas valve box (GVB) is an indispensable part that mainly provides functions of gas throughput control and measurement of gas pressure, flow rate, and temperature. The preliminary structure design is largely driven by the requirements of magnetic field compatibility and limited integration space. A strong magnetic field of over 0.2 T exists around the GVB locations, so a magnetic shielding design is required to ensure the normal function of susceptible components. Instead of the previous overall shielding, a local magnetic shielding has been developed by a validated analysis method. As a result, the total weight of the shield has been reduced from over 7000 kg to about 200 kg. Furthermore, considering the limited space reservation, a highly compact flat layout for the GF GVB has been developed to ensure enough maintenance space in front of it. In addition, other requirements such as structure integrity under various load combinations, leak detectability, in situ maintainability, etc., have all been taken into account.