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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.
Sumei Liu, Qigang Wu, Mingzhun Lei
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 5 | July 2023 | Pages 567-577
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2157185
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A loss of vacuum accident (LOVA) occurs during in-vessel component failure and air ingress. The airflow characteristics of a LOVA are determined by many factors like initial pressure, location of a break, and size of a break and have a great impact on dust migration, which could cause a serious explosion with incoming air and H2. In this paper, a computational fluid dynamics method is adopted, and the k-ε Shear Stress Transport model for airflow and the Discrete Phase Model for dust are used to simulate a LOVA with the updated Chinese Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) tokamak device. The effects of initial pressure, break size, and break location on airflow during the LOVA are discussed, and the effects of dust size, break size, and break location on dust migration during the LOVA are investigated as well. The results indicate that the initial pressure and size of a break have a greater impact on airflow of a LOVA than the location of the break and that both the dust size and the characteristics of the airflow have a greater impact on the distribution of the dust. A break located in the upper port has even more dust chaos. This research is the basis for the safety analysis of the CFETR device, and it provides a reference for subsequent studies on dust removal, mitigation of dust explosions, and radioactive substances.