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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.
Aleksei Meshcheryakov, Irina Grishina
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 4 | May 2023 | Pages 476-487
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2023.2174319
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
At the L-2M stellarator, in the electron cyclotron resonance heating regime, the processes of plasma self-organization were studied in different successive phases of plasma confinement during the facility shot. It is shown that in the phase of initial plasma heating, because of the absence of plasma-wall interaction, the canonical pressure profiles of the electronic component are not formed. In the quasi-stationary phase, the forming pressure profiles are close to the canonical one, and the energy loss is somewhat higher than in the phase beginning immediately after switching off the microwave heating pulse. After turning off the microwave pulse, the self-organization processes form the canonical pressure profiles of the electronic component in plasma, which ensure minimal energy loss from the plasma. In this case, the total power of energy losses from the plasma is proportional to the cube of the plasma energy.