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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.
Xiaojun Ni, Songbo Han, Jian Ge, Jinxin Sun
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 78 | Number 5 | July 2022 | Pages 352-359
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.2021723
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) is the next tokamak device in China to bridge the gaps between ITER and the DEMOnstration nuclear fusion reactor (DEMO). The CFETR vacuum vessel (VV) was designed to remove nuclear heating, provide safety shielding, and maintain a high-quality vacuum environment. Seismic load is considered one of the most relevant accidental events affecting the structural integrity of the VV. In order to investigate the resistance of the CFETR VV against seismic load, finite element models of the VV were built. In this paper, equivalent static and response spectrum analyses were carried out to calculate displacements and stress fields aiming to check the response of the CFETR VV against a foreseen seismic load. The resulting stresses are lower than the allowable limits and satisfy the design requirements.