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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.
H. B. Xu, R. Guo, Z. Cao, M. Li, X. L. Liu, B. Zhang, HL-2A Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 2 | February 2023 | Pages 162-167
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2131162
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Pellet injection (PI) is the preferred fueling method in the future fusion reactor. It is particularly important to study the flow field characteristics of the frozen fuel extrusion process for the future steady operation of the pellet injector. In order to study the influence of groove depth on extrusion flux and conveying capacity, the flow field characteristics of a repetitive pellet injector with a single-screw extruder in the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) was numerically simulated with POLYFLOW software. Thus, information about pressure field, viscous heating, and velocity field distribution was obtained. The results indicate that to a certain extent, increasing the groove depth (while maintaining the gaps between the screw and extrusion cylinder) is beneficial for the conveying capacity and pressure building capacity. The results of the numerical simulations show that at a screw speed of 120 rpm, screw outer diameter of 20 mm, screw length of 230 mm, screw groove depth of 6 mm, and screw prism gap of 0.3 mm, solid hydrogen can be stably extruded, and the velocity of the extruded ice at the nozzle is 0.15 m/s, which meets the design requirement of the CFETR PI system. These results also provide good references for structure design and performance optimization of the CFETR pellet injector.