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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. B. Xu, G. L. Zhu, Z. Cao, Y. B. Dong, Y. K. Zhong, X. Cai, L. Liu, Y. G. Li, Z. C. Yang, J. Wang, P. Lu, D. Q. Liu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 7 | October 2020 | Pages 857-860
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1817703
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A shattered pellet injector based on in situ technology was installed on the HL-2A tokamak, and preliminary experiments were performed recently. In this paper, a fast current shutdown experiment introduces shattered pellet injection (SPI). In comparison with spontaneous disruptions and massive gas injection, SPI has advantages for disruption mitigation. The experimental results show the hard-X-ray radiation intensity (40 to 60 keV) rapidly falling from 20 to 0 when SPI is used. From this, we can infer that runaway electrons are suppressed. This observation indicates that SPI should be a good candidate for current fast shutdown in the future.
