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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.
Nemanja Aranđelović, Dušan Nikezić, Dragan Brajović, Uzahir Ramadani
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 78 | Number 5 | July 2022 | Pages 369-378
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2031690
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recently, the idea of injecting energy with electromagnetic radiation in order to heat the plasma to achieve controlled fusion has been abandoned. This initially favored mechanism was rejected because it has been shown that after a certain temperature the plasma glows and acts as a mirror that reflects electromagnetic radiation. For that reason, today the energy is injected into the plasma by electrons. For this purpose, pulses from several electron beam generators, based on a Marx generator, are synchronously fired into the plasma. In addition to economic problems, the biggest problem of this method is the appearance of jitter, i.e., pulses with a width of about 5 ns are not simply added up but propagated in time due to the impossibility of synchronizing simultaneous triggering of the multiple electronic generators. In order to avoid this, the possibility of monitoring the pulses from an individual electron beam generator for the purpose of online synchronization is investigated in this paper. The voltage pulse monitoring of the electron beam generator was measured by instruments with the fastest response—the electro-optical Kerr effect and a fast capacitive probe. The obtained results showed that the electro-optical Kerr response is somewhat faster but much more complicated, so the use of fast capacitive probes is recommended for practice.