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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.
Milos Atz, Xudong Liu, Massimiliano Fratoni, Joonhong Ahn (Univ of California, Berkeley), Fumio Hirano (JAEA)
Proceedings | 16th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM 2017) | Charlotte, NC, April 9-13, 2017 | Pages 608-614
After nuclear waste is buried in a repository, hydrogeological processes can dissolve, transport, separate, and rearrange radionuclides inside or outside the repository. If fissile material becomes separated from neutron absorbers and precipitates in a far-field geologic formation, a critical mass may be formed. Far-field criticality could greatly increase the dose to the biosphere by releasing highly mobile and radioactive fission products outside all engineered barriers.
The scope of this study is to assess the impact of the spent fuel composition and host rock type on the risk of criticality in the far field. In particular, this study performs neutronics analysis in order to determine the minimum theoretical mass of fissile material needed to achieve criticality in a water-saturated far-field deposition under conservative conditions. Light water reactor spent fuel compositions are determined using ORIGEN-ARP as a function of initial enrichment and burnup for various fuel and reactor types. Different compositions of potential host rocks are considered. For each combination of spent fuel type and host rock, the deposition minimum critical mass is obtained at 200,050 years after fuel discharge by iterative MCNP calculation in the space of initial enrichment and discharge burnup. The results are compared for different types of spent fuels to demonstrate the effects of reactor, fuel, and fuel assembly types on the minimum critical mass. Fissile material from MOX and PWR spent fuels is shown to have a smaller minimum critical mass than that of UO2 or BWR spent fuels due to increased reactivity whereas the assembly type is insignificant. For a fixed fissile content in the deposition, the critical mass increases linearly with spent fuel burnup. For representative compositions of fissile material, perturbation calculations are carried out on the composition of each host rock to identify minerals with a large impact on neutronics. Overall, this work yields insights into how the fuel cycle can be controlled to mitigate or eliminate the risk of far-field criticality. In addition, the results provide a scientific basis for future criticality safety assessment studies and the engineeringinformed decisions that will be required when repository sites are selected.
