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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.
Masayuki Tokitani, Yukinori Hamaji, Yutaka Hiraoka, Yuki Hayashi, Suguru Masuzaki, Hitoshi Tamura, Hiroyuki Noto, Teruya Tanaka, Tatsuya Tsuneyoshi, Yoshiyuki Tsuji, Gen Motojima, Hiromi Hayashi, Takanori Murase, Takeo Muroga, Akio Sagara, Tomohiro Morisaki
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 6 | August 2023 | Pages 651-661
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2023.2176184
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A novel method, called Advanced Multi-Step Brazing, was developed to fabricate a new type of divertor heat removal component with W armor and an oxide-dispersion-strengthened copper (GlidCop®) heat sink in the initial phase of our work. Later, a new type of divertor heat removal component, which has a rectangular-shaped cooling channel with a V-shaped staggered-rib structure in the GlidCop heat sink, was developed. This new component showed an extremely high heat removal capability during a ~30 MW/m2 steady-state heat loading condition in our previous work. In this work, the new component was installed in the divertor strike position of the Large Helical Device and exposed to neutral beam injection–heated plasma discharges with 1180 shots (~8000 s) in total. Though submillimeter-scale damage, such as unipolar arc trails and microscale cracks, was identified on the W surface, the extremely high heat removal capability did not show any sign of degradation over the experimental period. On the other hand, remarkable sputtering erosion and redeposition phenomena, due to the strong influx of the divertor plasma, was confirmed on the W armor.
