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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.
Nikolaus Christiansen, Derek Schmidt, John Martinez, Valerie Fatherley, Justin Jorgenson, Noah Birge, Verena Geppert-Kleinrath, Carl Wilde
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 7 | October 2023 | Pages 907-913
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2023.2210298
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The neutron pinhole array, used to collect neutron burn, X-ray, and more recently, gamma emission images, has been in use at the National Ignition Facility since 2011. Since then, there has been the ever-continuing challenge of meeting tighter alignment and resolution requirements. Part of that challenge is being able to accurately characterize the as-built variances from the nominal design associated with the manufacturing and assembly of the pinhole array. To overcome this specific challenge, multiple processes are taken to obtain high-precision profiles of the various features of each pinhole array. This paper highlights the processes used as well as the steps taken to compile the significant amount of data and turn it into an accurate as-built reconstructed model of the NIS1-U–assembled pinhole array.