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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.
Wenjun Yang, Guoqiang Li, Xueyu Gong, Xiang Gao, Xiaoe Li, Hang Li, Songlin Liu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 78 | Number 2 | February 2022 | Pages 164-173
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1969064
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) is a new superconducting tokamak device being designed in China, aiming to bridge the gaps between ITER and future fusion power plants. In addition to the temperature dependence, the cross section also depends on the spin states of the reactant nuclei. In this paper, we calculate the neutron source and neutron wall loading (NWL) distributions and investigate the effect of spin polarization on them. For the two unpolarized scenarios at the CFETR, the neutron source distributions have obvious differences, but the poloidal distributions of the NWL have a similar tendency and are just a little different except near the outboard midplane. For the hybrid mode scenario, the maximum of the NWL is near the outboard midplane. However, for the full parallel or antiparallel polarization, the NWL distributions have a big difference in the poloidal direction, and the maximum of the NWL occurs in the upper region of the first wall. The calculation results show that it is possible to optimize blanket design by using polarized fuels at the CFETR, and then increase the working life of the first wall.