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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.
Yoichi Yamamoto, Shigeru Kubota, Satoru Suzuki (NUMO)
Proceedings | 16th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM 2017) | Charlotte, NC, April 9-13, 2017 | Pages 452-461
This paper provides the outline of trial repository designs and specific design examples of underground facilities for the SDMs in NUMO safety case. Purposes of the repository design in this study are as follows.
· To show methodologies for developing flexible repository designs, tailored to various site conditions and changes in the social environment.
· To emphasize progress of the practical application of engineering technologies related to construction, operation and closure of a repository, based on technology developments for the manufacture and construction of engineered barrier systems.
· To confirm that the repository concepts developed here are capable of ensuring pre- and post-closure safety for the potential host rock formations defined in this safety case and meet the requirements in terms of practicality.
In designing the underground repository layout, the functions and design requirements of the key tunnels constituting the underground facilities were first identified, then the layout of them was designed taking into consideration discontinuous geological structures, i.e., faults and bed boundaries, and the groundwater flow. Regarding the shapes of the disposal panel for the highlevel vitrified waste, the through type and the dead-end type were adapted for the vertical emplacement concept and for the horizontal emplacement concept, respectively. The layouts of the underground facilities were provided for each emplacement concept. As the results of comparison among these design options, the underground facility combined with the horizontal emplacement concept and the dead-end type panel was identified as a relatively efficient and economical approach which is flexibly applicable to the geological structure.
