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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.
Changhu Xing, Casey J. Jesse, Warren F. Jones, Maxine P. Johnson, Ann Marie Phillips, Theron D. Marshall
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 7 | July 2023 | Pages 1467-1478
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2153599
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Knowing the thickness of the oxide layer on the surface of aluminum fuel cladding is vitally important for predicting fuel temperature due to the low thermal conductivity of the oxide layer. Several correlation models for predicting oxide growth can be found in the literature. In previous research, the correlations were combined with heat transfer simulations in Abaqus, a finite element analysis code, to forecast the oxide growth. However, this approach requires heat transfer coefficients for modeling heat exchanges with the external flow field, and such coefficients were obtained through empirical equations. Since different empirical equations yield varying heat transfer coefficients, the cladding temperature and predicted oxide thickness both carry a high degree of uncertainty. This research develops a new approach that integrates the fluid flow, fluid and solid heat transfer, and oxide growth correlation(s) into a single computational fluid dynamics model. We demonstrate this approach’s ability to predict oxide development on the AFIP-7 plates during two Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) irradiation cycles. The projected oxide thickness falls within the experimental measurements taken during post irradiation examination.