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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.
J. D. Giallonardo, P. G. Keech, D. Doyle (NWMO)
Proceedings | 16th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM 2017) | Charlotte, NC, April 9-13, 2017 | Pages 173-182
The Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) has proposed the concept of a deep geological repository (DGR) for the storage of Canada’s used nuclear fuel. A major component of the engineered barrier system is the used fuel container (UFC). NWMO’s UFC design has been optimized for CANDU fuel. It consists of a structural containment vessel fabricated from carbon steel which houses 48 used fuel bundles. The structural vessel is comprised of a cylindrical shell welded to hemi-spherical heads at either end. An integrally bonded 3 mm thick copper coating is applied to the exterior surface of the steel vessel for corrosion protection. Since 2011, the NWMO has conducted a multi-phase development program for the advancement of copper coating technologies application to UFC’s. This program consisted of proof of concept testing, optimization, technology scale-up and demonstration on full size UFC prototypes. From this work, two reference coating technologies have been identified: electrodeposition and cold spray. Electrodeposition will be used to copper coat the factory supplied UFC components (lower assembly and upper hemi-spherical head); it is a well established, straight-forward, industrial technique that is easily adapted to the UFC material and geometry under conventional fabrication conditions. The cold spray coating process will be used to complete the application of the corrosion barrier to the remaining uncoated zone about the closure weld following final assembly in the hot cell. In this regard, cold spray is well suited to automated robotic application in a radioactive environment. The objective of this paper is to present a current review of NWMO’s copper coating development program, application process to UFC’s and performance testing along with planned future work for continued advancement of the technologies.
