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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.
João Pedro Fonseca Ferro
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 78 | Number 5 | July 2022 | Pages 347-351
Letter to the Editor | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2039032
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The editorial staff has chosen to publish this letter to present new nonorthodox physical ideas, which necessitate pondering on possibilities about how to formulate new physics and conduct the supportive calculations. This letter is just a proposal for a different philosophical view on the possibility of reaching the fusion reaction, outlining the corresponding physical solutions. If the presented ideas find followers and support, further developments may be expected for the realization of the technical aspects of this fusion process. At least, we hope this letter to the editor provokes discussion in the fusion community.
—Leigh Winfrey, editor, and Arkady Serikov, associate editor
When two (or more) nuclei fuse to form a heavier element, a known quantity of energy is released. Today, the process seems easy to describe, at least to some degree.
The endeavor to construct the devices for fusion energy is great, and there are some experimental ones running the diverse experiments. The proposal now presented is a nanoapparatus. If one could do such a nanodevice, it could be integrated in a wide range of applications once it is possible to consider it portable and able to generate different controllable amounts of energy.
The author calls this document, in a broad sense, a conceptual thesis. Mostly, it has natural language as the principal tool. A guide for the calculations was worked to complete the essay, supporting a possible configuration of a nanodevice. This is a kind of a conjecture, a logical but speculative one, that needs to be verified. Like some studies, this one shows first and only its most theoretical content.
The author either explicitly or implicitly discusses the space-time fabric, double-slit experiment, and other concepts, like nonduality and indistinguishability. The technology is supported by some established theories or others that have been adapted.
