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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.
Philippe Planquart, Chiara Spaccapaniccia, Giacomo Alessi, Sophia Buckingham (von Karman Inst), Katrien Van Tichelen (SCK-CEN)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 131-142
The thermal-hydraulics challenges of a nuclear reactor are numerous and mastering these is crucial for the design and safety of new reactors. Numerical simulation through computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes or System Thermal-Hydraulics (STH) codes can address a lot of the different questions, nevertheless the use of water modeling for the study of the thermal-hydraulic behavior of a new primary system and the validation of codes remains an extremely valuable tool. A water model of the pool-type PbBi-cooled MYRRHA reactor has been developed at the von Karman Institute in collaboration with SCK•CEN. It is a full Plexiglas model at a geometrical scale 1/5 of MYRRHA. This transparent water model allows the application of optical measurement techniques, like Particle Image velocimetry (PIV) for the flow characterization. Local results of PIV measurements performed in the lower plenum at the entrance of the core are presented and compared with CFD results for a nominal operating condition and a natural convection case simulating the decay heat removal. A very good agreement has been found in the velocity field. The results also show the importance of the radial flow entering the core of the water model in natural convection.
