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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.
Haozhe Qiu, Kun Lu, Xiaojun Ni, Jianghua Wei, Songbo Han
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 78 | Number 8 | November 2022 | Pages 676-682
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2103312
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The vacuum vessel is the core component of the Chinese Fusion Engineering Testing Reactor (CFETR); its main function is to remove nuclear heating, provide safety shielding, and maintain a high-quality vacuum environment. Therefore, the safety of the vacuum vessel is of great significance to the CFETR, and examining its dynamic performance is necessary. However, the conventional finite element method takes too long to perform the dynamic analysis of the vacuum vessel, which greatly reduces the efficiency of the design and analysis. Based on the modal synthesis method, this study uses ANSYS software to establish a substructure model of the CFETR vacuum vessel. A modal analysis and harmonic response analysis are conducted, and their results are compared with those of the conventional finite element model. The results show that the substructure model not only has the same accuracy as conventional finite element models, but that it also greatly reduces the time of dynamic calculation.