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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.
V. Badalassi, A. Sircar, J. M. Solberg, J. W. Bae, K. Borowiec, P. Huang, S. Smolentsev, E. Peterson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 3 | April 2023 | Pages 345-379
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2151818
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Fusion Energy Reactor Models Integrator (FERMI) is an integrated simulation environment under development for the coupled simulation of the plasma, first wall, and blanket of fusion reactor designs. The FERMI goals are to shorten the overall design cycle while guaranteeing unprecedented accuracy, thus integrating fusion design activities, facilitating an optimal reactor design, and reducing development risks. These goals are achieved by coupling single-physics solvers into a multiphysics simulation environment (FERMI). The Integrated Plasma Simulator (IPS)–FASt TRANsport (IPS-FASTRAN) simulation framework is used for the following: plasma physics, MCNP/Shift codes for neutron and photon transport, OpenFoam for computational fluid dynamics and magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), HyPerComp Incompressible MHD solver for Arbitrary Geometry (HIMAG) for dual-coolant lead-lithium (DCLL) blankets, and DIABLO for structural mechanics simulations. These codes are coupled using the open-source library named precise Code Interaction Coupling Environment (preCICE). FERMI’s features are tested with the analysis of the liquid immersion blanket (LIB) [proposed in the Affordable Robust Compact (ARC)–class tokamak design], the DCLL blanket [proposed in the Fusion Pilot Plant (FPP) design], and other benchmark cases. The calculated figures of merit are the tritium breeding ratio, material activation, displacements per atom, shutdown dose rate, heat deposited in the vacuum vessel and blanket, temperature hot spots, and displacements caused by swelling and creep. A critical technical problem is multiphysics code coupling, which is tackled here, and the first three-dimensional (3D) simulations of the DCLL-FPP and LIB-ARC blankets are presented. To the authors’ knowledge, FERMI represents the first effort to perform 3D simulations of nuclear fusion first wall and blankets in a fully coupled multiphysics manner.