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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.
Benjamin Lilley, Todd S. Palmer
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 8 | August 2023 | Pages 1902-1910
Technical papers from: PHYSOR 2022 | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2171273
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A many-reactor power plant with a shared used fuel pool presents significant challenges and a novel opportunity for fuel management optimization. We develop a Python package and interface it with optimization software and core modeling software to automate exploration of the design space for the multireactor multicycle problem. A genetic algorithm is used to search the core reload design space for a two-reactor system, with and without used fuel sharing. With equal computational effort, we find that the fuel-sharing strategy slightly lowers cost.