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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.
Changle Liu, Lei Li, Yu Zhou, Peng Zhang, Jun Song, Songtao Wu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 5 | July 2023 | Pages 610-615
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2162795
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the goals of fusion blanket design is to explore the blanket material design to maintain the characteristics of the internal temperature field. This is because the characteristics of the temperature field have an important influence on the effectiveness of tritium release for the blanket. In this work, the influence of material design on temperature field characteristics is studied based on a multizone structure blanket model. It mainly focuses on the positions of the breeders, the multipliers, and the structural steel, including their material proportions in the blanket interior. It was found that the temperature field in the pure breeder region Li4SiO4 is relatively independent and has little influence on the adjacent regions because its location is closer to the first wall. The first beryllium zone only affects the adjacent regions and will not repeatedly affect the remote areas. The second beryllium zone and the first mixed-pebble zone of the Li/Be zone are mainly limited to the structural materials due to the sensitivity of the temperature limitation of 550°C. This work will have very important support and reference for future fusion blanket engineering.
