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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.
M. Harb, D. Leichtle, B.-Y. Kim, J.-P. Martins, J. G. van der Laan, J. Bergman, E. Polunovskiy, A. Serikov
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 3 | April 2023 | Pages 305-319
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2109368
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the advances in the test blanket module program within the ITER project in the last few years concerned the evolution of the pipe forest (PF) and bioshield plug (BP) designs. In support of the design phase, nuclear analyses to assess several responses in the fusion neutronics environment inside the port interspace (PI) with the existence of the evolved PF and BP are deemed essential. Nuclear analyses were commenced using the new PF and BP with developing the neutronics models and performing preliminary assessment of the radiation fields and shutdown dose rate (SDDR) in the PI. In this paper, the results of a full suite of nuclear analyses are discussed, which covers more configurations and radiation sources, in two plasma operational modes: on and off. For the plasma-on mode, different shielding options were examined. The results show a clear benefit of combining the installation of shielding panels on the PF enclosure with those in the BP “dogleg,” through which the pipes penetrate to the port cell area. For the plasma-off mode, the SDDR was assessed from different sources: activated components and residual LiPb layers in pipes after drainage. As maintenance operations are foreseen during the lifetime of the facility, the SDDR was also assessed for access conditions, open BP doors, and transport conditions, with PF extracted in the gallery.