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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.
Boris V. Ivanov, V. S. Pantuev, A. N. Bukin, A. A. Semenov, M. I. Belyakov, A. I. Belesev, E. V. Geraskin, N. A. Ionov, V. I. Parfenov
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 78 | Number 1 | January 2022 | Pages 44-55
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1951533
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper describes the methods and presents the results of the “Troitsk Nu-mass” experiment spectrometer cleanup after the in\ner volume (40 m3) and surfaces (160 m2) were contaminated by 5.2 GBq of tritium. The Troitsk Nu-mass experiment of the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow) is designed to measure the spectrum of electrons from tritium decays in order to search for hypothetical particles—sterile neutrinos. Due to some equipment failures, the spectrometer internal volume was contaminated with tritium. The contamination made measurements impossible, and the research program stopped. Different methods were used for cleanup: vacuum extraction, hydrogen soaks, and water vapor soaks. As a result of detritiation, the background level of the main detector of the Troitsk Nu-mass spectrometer was reduced approximately by more than ten times, which made it possible to resume work. The results are consistent with the literature data obtained earlier for normal conditions in the air and can be used for detritiation of similar installations.
