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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.
Dingqing Guo, Chao Chen, Zhen Wang, Jian Lin, Bing Zhang, Daochuan Ge, Zhibin Chen
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 78 | Number 2 | February 2022 | Pages 103-110
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1960089
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The fusion reactor fueled by deuterium and tritium will generate many neutron activation products, causing occupational exposure and radiation risk. The minimization of occupational radiation exposure (ORE) is one of the safety goals for fusion reactors. However, detailed designs and management schemes are still lacking for fusion reactors, and the ORE evaluations are still well simplified. In this paper, an integrated assessment approach is proposed for fusion reactors at the conceptual or detailed design stage. The core idea is to estimate the ORE by referring to the dose rates and work efforts of mature fission reactors and ITER and modifying the data of these similar systems by a proportional coefficient according to the differences of component scale, operating environment, etc. The results showed that water cooling fusion reactors will generate the highest collective dose of 2635 p-mSv/year, while the PbLi cooling ones come next with about 1684 p-mSv/year and the helium cooling ones are the least. This method will contribute to fusion reactor design, operation, and maintenance optimization at the earlier stages and provide guidance to reduce the overall potential ORE to workers.