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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.
Sven Bader (AREVA), Collin Dolan, Dmytro Zaytsev, Daniel Gryder, Nicholas Cesmat, Qutaiba Enaya, Michael Segura (Univ of North Carolina at Charlotte)
Proceedings | 16th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM 2017) | Charlotte, NC, April 9-13, 2017 | Pages 568-579
AREVA revisited the Dry Transfer System (DTS) [1] developed in 1996 by TransNuclear (another AREVA subsidiary) under a public-private partnership between the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and the U.S Department of Energy (DOE) and examined the ability to redevelop its design in order to meet potential repackaging needs for used/spent nuclear fuel (UNF). The original purpose of the DTS was to transfer UNF from smaller bolted cask systems to larger bolted cask systems and the proposed redesigned DTS is envisioned to perform repackaging activities from multiple differently designed cask systems, including those with canisters that will require cutting and welding activities. The redesigned DTS is also to provide operational flexibility by allowing for the repackaging of UNF from several cask systems at the same time by providing lag storage and will include a means for examining UNF during repackaging. Finally, the feasibility of redesigning the DTS to be a mobile facility to allow it to be used at multiple reactor sites,especially the “stranded” sites where no spent fuel pools exist, was examined. This paper provides a summary of: the DTS design, which was evaluated by the NRC [2] and portions of which were cold-tested at Idaho National Lab [3]; the revised design criteria for an updated DTS; and conceptual layouts of the revised DTS. A revised DTS is envisioned to provide an important tool for the future management of UNF in preparation for transportation, re-storage, and/or disposal and also provides a means for repackaging UNF in case recovery from a cask/canister system is necessary (e.g., due to extended storage).