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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.
Jean-Michel Bosgiraud, Christophe Baroux, Frédéric Bumbieler, Didier Crusset (Andra)
Proceedings | 16th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM 2017) | Charlotte, NC, April 9-13, 2017 | Pages 52-61
Andra, the French national radioactive waste management agency, is in charge of studying the disposal of high-level and long-lived intermediate-level waste (HLW and ILW-LL) in a deep geological repository (aka Cigéo). After a brief description of HLW disposal package models, their main functions are presented (handling purposes, containment of radioactive substances, criticality hazard control, delaying water contact with vitrified matrix, etc.). The horizontal steel cased disposal cell (0.7m ID micro-tunnel) inside which the disposal packages will be stored is also presented. The design options and the manufacturing processes of the disposal package are then described in order to show how the best technologies have been selected to ensure that the leak and gas tightness of the overpack is maintained as long as possible (and at least 500 years).
The following part of the paper is then focused on a description of the numerical simulations and corrosion tests (general corrosion, pitting and crevice corrosion, stress corrosion cracking with influence of the evolution of the water chemistry, temperature and radiolysis) performed in order to evaluate the mechanical behavior and durability of the disposal package. The mechanical studies focus on the behavior of a confined API5LX65MS steel casing (the disposal cell liner) submitted to general corrosion which governs the long term mechanical loading of the overpack. First numerical simulations performed to determine the ductile damage of a low alloy steel overpack subjected to both, general corrosion and localized mechanical loads are also presented.
