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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.
Jianhang Zhou, Jinglong Zhang, Jie Zhang, Yipo Zhang, Hong Yang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 78 | Number 7 | October 2022 | Pages 588-594
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2090785
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Neutron flux measurement provides essential data for the diagnostic tools that control plasma combustion, equipment maintenance, and radiation safety and reveals key information on plasma physics, machine protection, and control issues. To obtain rapid change of the neutron emission rate by magnetohydrodynamic instabilities, a fast neutron flux measurement system with high time resolution (~10 ) was developed on the HL-2M tokamak (located at Southwestern Institute of Physics, China). The system includes four EJ-410 detectors and four digitizers that we developed ourselves with dedicated field-programmable gate array firmware, including a waveform recording function, real-time count rate measurement, and real-time integration measurement. The simulation results show that the throughput rate of the readout electronics is 96.7% when the input counting rate is 1 mega count per second (Mcps) and the throughput rate could achieve 63.8% when the input counting rate is 6 Mcps. Moreover, when the input counting rate increases further to 10 Mcps, the integration model may be used. Given that this measurement system is highly portable and has a high time resolution, it is suitable for the fast neutron flux diagnostic on the HL-2A tokamak.
