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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.
Shouhua Sun, Jingyi Shi, Liuliu Li, Lei Peng
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 78 | Number 2 | February 2022 | Pages 134-148
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1962120
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Helium produced by neutron irradiation is a crucial inducement to bring about the property of deterioration of structural materials served in a fusion reactor. To investigate the nucleation and growth behavior of helium bubbles in reduced activation ferritic/martensitic steels, which comprise one of the most promising candidate structural materials, the Molecular Statics method and the Metropolis Monte Carlo algorithm are combined to investigate the energetic and mechanical behaviors of HenVm clusters in α-Fe. The simulation results show that the vacancy and helium atom binding energy are inclined to reach a saturation state, i.e., 4.0 eV for the vacancy and 2.4 eV for the helium atom; however, the binding energy of self-interstitial atoms decreases to minus values at high helium-to-vacancy (He/V) ratios. The crossover of the binding energy curve of the helium and vacancy indicates that the equilibrium He/V ratio is 1.68 during the nucleation of helium bubbles. Meanwhile, the dissociation energy analysis indicates that the stable He/V ratio of the clusters is 1.3 at high temperatures. Moreover, the pressure analysis of the HenVm clusters indicates that the He/V ratio corresponding to their mechanical equilibrium state varies from 0.50 to 0.65 at 0 K. Furthermore, the analysis combined with the relevant experimental data of helium density in helium bubbles indicates that the actual He/V ratio of helium bubbles in the served materials is closely relevant to the irradiation condition, such as helium production rate, temperature, etc. The investigation results in this paper contribute to elucidate the microscopic process of helium bubble nucleation and growth and provides the energetic and mechanical parameters of small-sized helium bubbles with different sizes for large-scale simulation studies.
