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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.
Nicholas Klymyshyn, Philip J. Jensen (PNNL), David Garrido (ENSA)
Proceedings | 16th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM 2017) | Charlotte, NC, April 9-13, 2017 | Pages 79-83
Equipos Nucleares, S.A. (ENSA) and the US Department of Energy are preparing a full scale test of a commercial spent nuclear fuel (SNF) dual-purpose cask to study the loading conditions applied to SNF under normal conditions of transportation. The test campaign will use a commercial transportation package that is loaded with two or three instrumented fuel assemblies (loaded with surrogate material to represent the mass of SNF) to measure strains at cladding locations and accelerations on the fuel assemblies. Accelerometers will also be used at various locations throughout the full conveyance system to study the transmission of loads through the system and provide validation for numerical models. Preliminary numerical models have been developed to study the transmission of postulated shock and vibration loads through the commercial package conveyance system. After the test campaign is concluded, these models will be validated against the test data and then used to estimate the response of real SNF to the normal conditions of rail transportation loading environment. The current study uses the preliminary models to evaluate the load transmission through the system and calculate pre-test predictions of the fuel assembly response.