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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.
Haihong Huang, Lan Peng, Haixin Wang, Xu Wu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 82 | Number 3 | April 2026 | Pages 684-703
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2025.2523611
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The problem of a gradual increase in the capacity of the magnetic confinement power supply in a tokamak device is effectively solved with insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) parallel connections. The steady-state junction temperature balance (SSJTB) is one of the key factors for the safe and stable operation of parallel IGBTs. Therefore, it is crucial to improve the stability of parallel IGBTs by investigating the steady-state junction temperature difference (SSJTD) of parallel IGBTs under thermal resistance mismatch.
However, the existing methods focus mainly on modeling the IGBT thermal network or single thermal resistance matching. These results do not analyze the matching strategy between the thermal resistance and the gate resistance. The research in this paper found that the gate resistance and thermal resistance parameters affect the SSJTD of parallel IGBTs. In the case of thermal resistance parameter mismatch due to inconsistent heat dissipation conditions, there exists a reasonable gate resistance parameter that allows the parallel IGBTs to reduce the SSJTD under the total influence of both.
Therefore, a SSJTD model was created to analyze and calculate the equilibrium point. The simulation results showed that the parameter compensation scheme can effectively reduce the SSJTD between the parallel IGBTs, which can guide the junction temperature equalization strategy of the parallel IGBTs and can also be used as the basis for the parameter adjustment of the active gate drive.
