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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.
Zhipeng Feng, Fenggang Zang, Shuai Liu, Huanhuan Qi, Xuan Huang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 3 | March 2023 | Pages 428-442
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2118478
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To further investigate fluid-structure–interaction problems that occur in the nuclear field such as the behavior of pressurized water reactor fuel rods, steam generator tubes, and other heat exchanger tubes, the flow-induced vibrations of two flexible tubes in tandem, side-by-side, and in staggered arrangements are investigated. First, a three-dimensional numerical model for fluid-structure interaction of flexible tubes in cross flow is developed. It is a three-dimensional fully coupled approach with solving the fluid flow and the structure vibration simultaneously. Second, results are presented in the form of force coefficients, dynamic response, trajectories, and wake vortex pattern. The effects of pitch ratio, tube arrangement, and flow velocity on the vibration response and the flow field characteristic are investigated. Critical pitch and critical velocity are obtained successfully. The critical velocity depends heavily on pitch ratio. Under the same pitch ratio and velocity, the side-by-side tubes have the maximum value of fluid force and vibration amplitude, followed by the staggered tubes the and tandem tubes in sequence. The trajectory and wake vortex pattern are highly dependent on tube arrangement, pitch ratio, and flow velocity.