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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.
V. I. Vysotskii, M. V. Vysotskyy
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 5 | July 2023 | Pages 537-552
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2151284
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The prerequisites and mechanism for the implementation of efficient pulsed (flashing) nuclear fusion in a low-temperature hydrogen plasma with a temperature of 10 to 20 eV in a constant magnetic field are considered. It is shown for the first time that the natural very frequent alternation of the processes of ionization of atoms and recombination of ions leads to the synchronous formation of coherent correlated states of hydrogen nuclei and its isotopes. The formation of such states leads to the generation of very large fluctuations of kinetic energy (up to 10 to 100 keV) at the initial stage of each ionization event, which exists for most of the lifetime of the ionized state before ion recombination. It is shown that the relatively long duration of the existence of these fluctuations and their very large amplitude are sufficient for efficient nuclear fusion in such a magnetized low-temperature plasma.