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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.
S. Dargaville, R. P. Smedley-Stevenson, P. N. Smith, C. C. Pain
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 6 | June 2024 | Pages 1235-1254
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2240658
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Previously, we developed an adaptive method in angle that is based on solving in Haar wavelet space with a matrix-free multigrid for Boltzmann transport problems. This method scalably mapped to the underlying P0 space during every matrix-free matrix-vector product; however, the multigrid method itself was not scalable in the streaming limit. To tackle this, we recently built an iterative method based on using an Approximate Ideal Restriction multigrid with GMRES polynomials (AIRG) for Boltzmann transport that showed scalable work with uniform P0 angle in the streaming and scattering limits. This paper details the practical requirements of using this new iterative method with angular adaptivity. Hence, we modify our angular adaptivity to occur directly in P0 space rather than the Haar space. We then develop a modified stabilization term for our Finite Element Method that results in scalable growth in the number of nonzeros in the streaming operator with P0 adaptivity. We can therefore combine the use of this iterative method with P0 angular adaptivity to solve problems in both the scattering and the streaming limits, with close to fixed work and memory use.We also present a coarse-fine splitting for multigrid methods based on element agglomeration combined with angular adaptivity, which can produce a semicoarsening in the streaming limit without access to the matrix entries. The equivalence between our adapted P0 and Haar wavelet spaces also allows us to introduce a robust convergence test for our iterative method when using regular adaptivity. This allows the early termination of the solve in each adapt step, reducing the cost of producing an adapted angular discretization.
