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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.
Siyang Huang, Qiqi Yan, Wenxi Tian, G. H. Su, Suizheng Qiu (Xi’an Jiaotong Univ)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 44-56
In the nuclear power system, the critical heat flux (CHF) plays a crucial role in the reactor safety analysis. When CHF occurs, it will cause a sudden increase in the surface temperature, which would lead to the failure of fuel claddings and damage of the core. Considering the cross flow between neighboring channels, spacer grids and mixing vanes in the fuel assembly, the local flow conditions and the geometry of the flow channels make the prediction of CHF more complicated. In this paper, the departure from nucleate boiling (DNB) type CHF in rod bundle is investigated based on the coupled analysis of the subchannel method and a CHF mechanism model, i.e. the liquid sublayer dryout model. The liquid sublayer dryout model assumes that there is a thin liquid sublayer underneath a vapor blanket formed by the coalescence of small bubbles near the heated wall. The dryout of this sublayer will be regarded as the CHF occurrence. In present research, the homogeneous flow model is adopted in the subchannel analysis code to predict the local flow conditions for the rod bundle flow subchannels, which will be used as the input parameters for the liquid sublayer dryout model. In order to verify the method above, the predicted results are compared with the CHF Look-Up Table 2006 (LUT-2006) and the predicted results are in good agreement with the data in LUT-2006. In addition, the effects of rod bundle inlet subcooling, mass flux, heated length and motion conditions on CHF are analyzed.
