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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.
Thomas F. Fuerst, Matthew D. Eklund, John A. Leland, Adriaan A. Riet, Chase N. Taylor
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 8 | November 2023 | Pages 1224-1234
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2023.2196237
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tritium breeding is a critical component of any self-sustaining future fusion reactor. The liquid-metal eutectic PbLi is of particular interest as a tritium breeder material due to its favorable thermophysical and neutronic properties. One of the several remaining challenges facing PbLi breeder blankets is the need to design and validate a highly efficient tritium extraction system. The vacuum permeator is a promising extraction concept that utilizes tritium permeation through a highly permeable metal membrane. The Tritium Extraction eXperiment (TEX) is a forced-convection PbLi loop constructed to investigate tritium extraction from PbLi with vacuum permeators. Accurate thermal-hydraulic and tritium transport models are required to establish appropriate test matrices, predict experiment outcomes, and analyze data. However, the hydrogen transport properties of PbLi and permeator materials have large uncertainties. A database is collected and a parametric analysis is conducted on the effect of hydrogen transport material properties, including diffusivity of H in PbLi and the permeator, solubility of H in PbLi and the permeator, and the permeator surface recombination constant, on the expected tritium extraction efficiency for a vacuum permeator installed in TEX. Herein, we observe that the solubility of H in PbLi and the permeator and the recombination constant of the permeator have the largest effect on extraction efficiency.