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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.
Holger Seher, Guido Bracke, Gerd Frieling, Ingo Kock (GRS)
Proceedings | 16th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM 2017) | Charlotte, NC, April 9-13, 2017 | Pages 35-40
The TOUGH2 code was modified by GRS with several repository-relevant processes (called TOUGH2-GRS) and used as a code for simulating multi-phase flow in porous media. For code development and quality assurance, an extensive program was implemented to demonstrate the correctness and reliability of TOUGH2-GRS.
The LLW/ILW repository “Endlager für radioaktive Abfälle Morsleben (ERAM)” located in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, was chosen to evaluate the impact of grid complexity on the results obtained by two-phase flow calculations with TOUGH2-GRS for C-14. Three grids with increasing complexity regarding spatial resolution and including multiple mine levels were generated and compared with single-phase-flow calculations with parameter datasets for ERAM, taken from the application for its decommissioning, which is currently under review.
The discharge of relevant nuclides is in all cases below the discharge modeled by single-phase simulations. The calculated discharge of C-14 depends on the complexity of model grids. The highest release of C-14 was calculated for the grid with medium complexity for a scenario with significant brine entry.
