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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.
Shifa Wu, Jiashuang Wan, Zhi Chen, Longtao Liao, Kai Xiao, Pengfei Wang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 4 | April 2023 | Pages 660-675
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2123204
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To improve the economy and safety of small pressurized water reactors (SPWRs) with flexible operating characteristics, the reactor power control system should process excellent robustness to provide satisfactory control performances at different operating conditions. This paper proposes four control strategies for reactor power control of SPWRs based on the linear quadratic Gaussian with loop transfer recovery (LQG/LTR) robust control method, including the single-loop reactor power feedback control (RPFC), single-loop average temperature feedback control, dual-loop feedback control, and modified dual-loop feedback control (MDFC) strategies. The corresponding LQG/LTR controllers in the reactor power control system of a SPWR were designed to assess the performance of the four control strategies. The simulation results show that the LQG/LTR controller with the MDFC strategy can provide good control performances for both reactor power and average coolant temperature among the four control strategies while the controller-based single-loop feedback control shows poor control of the reactor power or average coolant temperature. Meanwhile, compared with the existing conventional reactor power control system, the designed robust control system employing the MDFC strategy can provide better control performance for the reactor power and average coolant temperature in full-power operation of 100% to 90% rated power and low-power operation of 25% to 35% rated power with the differential control rod worth taken as 4 pcm/step and 24 pcm/step, indicating its effectiveness and superiority.
