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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.
Bin Long, Ying Liu, Fulin Zeng, Jijun Zhou, Yuqian Yang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 78 | Number 5 | July 2022 | Pages 379-388
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2033061
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Edge-coherent mode (ECM) is one of the most promising modes in the tokamak fusion experiment, such as the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST). This paper presents an efficient convolution neural network model called NoiseNet for ECM recognition from the cross-power spectral data. NoiseNet suppresses the overfitting by applying noise in both the horizontal and vertical directions to the output of each layer of the convolution. And the improvement of the receptive field enables the convolution layer to better learn the difference between the ECM and the turbulence in the data. Experiments show that NoiseNet has better performance in ECM recognition with fewer parameters, and thus improved efficiency, than other major models, such as AlexNet, ResNet, and DenseNet. NoiseNet achieves a test accuracy of 93.94% on the ECM data sets. In addition, compared with the traditional method, this method does not depend on the empirical threshold and its generalization ability will improve with the increase in the amount of data.