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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.
A. Terakado, Y. Koide, M. Yoshida, T. Nakano, H. Homma, N. Oyama
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 78 | Number 2 | February 2022 | Pages 89-95
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1951529
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Heat-resistant in-vessel components, i.e., a heat sink, a front-end optics housing, and a diagnostic window have been designed in terms of heat-handling capability and thermal stress and mechanical stress by using a finite element method code. The heat sink, which is exposed to a plasma heat flux of up to 0.3 MW/m2, consists of carbon tiles, a carbon sheet, and a stainless steel heat sink with a water-cooling channel. Analysis shows that at a water flow rate of 0.9 kg/s with a water pressure of 0.5 MPa, an increase in the carbon tile temperature is mitigated below the limit related with detrimental red-hot (900°C). The front-end optics housing temperature and the diagnostic window of sapphire glass temperature are within the allowable temperature. The thermal stress and mechanical stress are less than the allowable value, respectively.