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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.
Dan G. Cacuci, Erkan Arslan
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 176 | Number 3 | March 2014 | Pages 339-349
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE13-31
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work applies the predictive modeling procedure formulated by Cacuci and Ionescu-Bujor [Nucl. Sci. Eng., Vol. 165, p. 18 (2010)] to assimilate experimental data from the international Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development/U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission boiling water reactor full-size fine-mesh bundle test (BFBT) benchmarks to calibrate and reduce systematically and significantly the uncertainties in the predictions of the light water reactor thermal-hydraulic code FLICA4. The BFBT benchmarks were designed by the Nuclear Power Engineering Corporation of Japan for enabling systematic validation of thermal-hydraulic codes by using full-scale experimental data. This work specifically uses BFBT experimental data for the “pump trip for a high-burnup assembly” in the predictive modeling formalism to calibrate parameters and time-dependent boundary conditions (power, mass flow rates, and outlet pressure distributions) in FLICA4, yielding best-estimate predictions of axial void fraction distributions. The resulting uncertainties for the best-estimate time-dependent model parameters and void fraction response distributions are shown to be smaller than the a priori experimental and computed uncertainties, thus demonstrating the successful use of predictive modeling for the large-scale reactor analysis code FLICA4 using BFBT benchmark-grade experiments.