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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.
Shiping Wei, Xinyu Sun, Haixia Wang, Jiangtao Jia, Zhibin Chen, Shichao Zhang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 7 | October 2020 | Pages 869-877
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1777668
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) tritium plant has to deal with a larger amount of tritium than ITER. The tritium source term is one of the key issues for safety assessment and operation of the CFETR. In this technical note, the preliminary estimation and safety analysis of the tritium source term for the CFETR tritium plant in normal operation have been performed on compliance with the ongoing plant design. The estimation method adopted is the system dynamics simulation performed by the Tritium Analysis program for fusion System developed by the Frontier Development of Science (FDS) team. The preliminary analysis results show that the storage and delivery system still stores the most amount of tritium. Until after 1 month of operation the plasma-facing material needs to be cleaned in the CFETR corresponding to the 600-g limit. Tritium losses, such as tritium permeation into the coolant and release to building rooms, are of a much smaller amount than tritium decay in the 2-week operation. It is worth noting that the tritium concentration somewhere in the tritium plant can be slightly more than 1 DAC (derived air concentration). These preliminary analysis results could provide some valuable references for the safety design and tritium management of the CFETR tritium plant.