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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.
T. Looby, M. Reinke, A. Wingen, J. Menard, S. Gerhardt, T. Gray, D. Donovan, E. Unterberg, J. Klabacha, M. Messineo
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 78 | Number 1 | January 2022 | Pages 10-27
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1951532
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The engineering limits of plasma-facing components (PFCs) constrain the allowable operational space of tokamaks. Poorly managed heat fluxes that push the PFCs beyond their limits not only degrade core plasma performance via elevated impurities, but can also result in PFC failure due to thermal stresses or melting. Simple axisymmetric assumptions fail to capture the complex interaction between three-dimensional (3-D) PFC geometry and two-dimensional or 3-D plasmas. This results in fusion systems that must either operate with increased risk or reduce PFC loads, potentially through lower core plasma performance, to maintain a nominal safety factor. High-precision 3-D heat flux predictions are necessary to accurately ascertain the state of a PFC given the evolution of the magnetic equilibrium. A new code, the Heat flux Engineering Analysis Toolkit (HEAT), has been developed to provide high-precision 3-D predictions and analysis for PFCs. HEAT couples many otherwise disparate computational tools together into a single open-source python package. Magnetic equilibrium, engineering computer-aided design, finite volume solvers, scrape-off layer plasma physics, visualization, high-performance computing, and more, are connected in a single web-based user interface. Linux users may use HEAT without any software prerequisites via an appImage. This paper introduces HEAT, discusses the software architecture, presents the first HEAT results, and outlines physics modules in development.