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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.
Yu Gu, Mengqi Fan, Tengfei Cao, Yuanzhe Zhao, Xiaodan Zhang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 78 | Number 4 | May 2022 | Pages 318-329
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.2009733
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In order to meet the needs of pulse experiments in different environments, a remote control and visualization system (RCVS) is designed and implemented based on the conceptual design of COntrol, Data Access and Communication (CODAC). RCVS works on the web server and adopts the website deployment mode of LAMP (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP/Python) and the working mode of B/S architecture. It includes a remote data acquisition module, a remote real-time visualization module, a monitoring module, and a remote data access module. In the first one, to avoid system deadlock and other problems caused by concurrent operations between local and remote users and concurrent scheduling conflicts between remote users, we have improved the previous solution and adopted the Deterministic Finite Automaton (DFA) and the Two-Phase Locking (2PL) protocol to unify the state of RCVS and that of the overall system and to ensure the serializability of concurrent operations. With regard to real-time data visualization, RCVS adopts the technology of server push to obtain the needed data to minimize the pressure on the server and shun some problems such as server paralysis caused by network congestion in the case of large-scale concurrent request. In addition, RCVS provides a monitoring method based on a heartbeat mechanism and an Application Programming Interface (API) of the web end of the MDSplus database for system status monitoring and remote data retrieval and analysis. Moreover, thanks to the responsive design and the deployment model of B/S architecture, the system can be accessed on any terminal device. This system as part of the overall experimental system will be integrated into the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) neutral beam injection master control system in the future and provide services of remote control and visualization for its long-pulse experiments.
