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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.
V. Pascal, G. Prulhière, M. Vanier, B. Fontaine
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 175 | Number 2 | October 2013 | Pages 109-123
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE12-19
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Before the definitive shutdown of the prototype Phénix, a final set of experiments was performed to gather important data about the operation and safety of sodium-cooled fast reactors (SFRs).Among the accident sequences that are to be taken into account, inadvertent withdrawal of a control rod is considered. During operation at nominal power, such a sequence induces a general power increase and local deformations of the power shape. Afterward, local fuel temperature increases can thereby lead to fuel melting and clad failure.The quasi-static control rod withdrawal test was specially designed to gather local power data on fissile assemblies and to complete validation databases of neutronic codes. The maximal deformation of the power shape reached ±12% and was obtained when two control rods were shifted in opposite directions.The test analysis was conducted with the neutronics code ERANOS-2.2. Comparisons between calculated and measured values were satisfying. Most of the discrepancies in power estimation can be explained by measurement problems (heat transfer, sodium mixing).The association of ERANOS-2.2 and the nuclear library JEFF-3.1, presently used for the predesign phase of the ASTRID reactor, constitutes an acceptable predictive tool for local and integral parameter estimations in SFRs, specifically in the evaluation of the control rod withdrawal incident.
