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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.
Yung-Shin Tseng, Chu Ching Hau, Jong-Rong Wang (NTHU), Po-Hsiu Lee, Chih-Tien Liu (Atomic Energy Council), Chunkuan Shih (NTHU)
Proceedings | 16th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM 2017) | Charlotte, NC, April 9-13, 2017 | Pages 580-586
Since the Chloride-Induced Stress Corrosion Cracking (CI-SCC) has been attended in the Chinshan ISFSI project, the details of thermal information and humidity on the Transportable Storage Canister (TSC) becomes the valuable data for investigating the CISCC aging management. This is because that the temperature not only influenced the threshold of deliquescence but affected the growth rate of crack depth. Since the chloride salt only becomes deliquescent in specific situation depending on the site (e.g., the environment temperature and relative humidity) and cask (e.g., loading pattern and thermal load) condition of CSISFSI, which can be further evaluated by an applicable simulated methodology. In this study, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD), FLUENT, was utilized to investigate the temperature and considered the temperature with the relative humidity profile on each height of TSC shell of CSISFSI. A validated high-accuracy 2D model was developed to accelerate the simulation time due to the time scale of CISCC being up to 20 years. The result shows that the relative humidity will reduce as the temperature of TSC increases by decay heat of SNFs. For this reason, the maximum accumulated crack depth of the TSC will not exceed more than 0.36m height with 0.33mm/year, which is the maximum crack growth rate as the most conservative CaCl2 deliquescent threshold was assumed for prediction. Those quantized results not only prove that the re-inspection planning with 10 year period is enough to ensure the integrity of TSC but also provide a basis to reduce about 90% load for CSISFSI re-inspection work.