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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.
Shokoufeh Zargar, Ricardo A. Medina (Univ of New Hampshire), Luis Ibarra (Univ of Utah)
Proceedings | 16th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM 2017) | Charlotte, NC, April 9-13, 2017 | Pages 931-939
This research deals with the development and calibration of numerical models of fuel rods based on quasi-static and vibration experiments performed on intact (unirradiated) rods. The original rod configuration exhibits a gap between the cladding and pellets that may be reduced, or even closed, after irradiation due to the swelling of the pellets, leading to bonding between the pellets and cladding. In this paper two cases are investigated. First, the pellets are bonded to the cladding, with the pellets just in contact with one another (de-bonded). Second, the pellets are in contact with the cladding and with one another without bonding. Due to limited availability of irradiated fuel rods and their restricted workability, the experiments were performed on unirradiated surrogate copper claddings with steel pellets, and the bonding was simulated using adhesive epoxy. The experiments were conducted with fixtures that represent pin supports. The results obtained on the vibration response of surrogate copper rods, indicate that bonding of the pellets and cladding results in a total rod flexural rigidity equal to the rigidity of the copper cladding and up to 15% of the flexural rigidity of the pellets. For the case of pellet-cladding in contact, the contribution of the steel pellets to the total rod flexural rigidity is negligible.
