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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.
Lijun Cai, Kun Lu, Yong Lu, Chunlin Lai, Junsong Shen, Dequan Liu, Jianghua Wei, Jian Liu, Yongqi Gu, Tao Lin, Mingxuan Lu, Yuxiang Liu, CFETR Integration Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 78 | Number 8 | November 2022 | Pages 631-639
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2100306
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The major radius of the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) is 7.2 m, and its minor radius is 2.2 m, which are larger than those of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). That makes the assembly of the CFETR machine more intricate and challenging due to the assembly tool design, and their stresses are more complex when the weight of key parts/components increases, especially the assembly of the cryostat vessel, the vacuum vessel (VV), the toroidal field (TF) magnets, the poloidal field (PF) magnets, and the thermal shielding (TS). Based on the characteristics of the CFETR machine, a 45-deg assembly sector (with eight sectors in total), containing one 45-deg VV sector, two TF magnets, and one 45-deg VV TS, was designed as an assembly unit together with its assembly tooling. To improve the assembly efficiency, three working regions along the toroidal direction of the CFETR machine were designed to operate simultaneously. In addition, the assembly tools of the PF magnets and the cryostat were considered, and all of them are capable of supporting and adjusting the large CFETR machine components. Meanwhile, to improve their assembly accuracy and measurement efficiency, a laser tracker, an indoor global positioning system, and a scanner were employed in their assembly process. In addition, a metrology network was built for assembly of the CFETR machine.