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NRC issues draft EA/FONSI for Duane Arnold restart
Efforts by NextEra Energy to restart the Duane Arnold nuclear power plant as early as 2029 continue to move forward with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's preliminary environmental assessment and determination that the restart would have no significant environmental impacts.
On Thursday, the NRC posted a draft environmental assessment and a finding of no significant impact for the Palo, Iowa, facility; the Federal Register notice was published on Monday. The Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing is a cooperating agency on the draft EA, as the DOE is considering providing financial assistance to the restart project.
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.