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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.
J. Cardoni, K. Ross, B. Beeny, D. Osborn (SNL)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 183-200
The paper details the computational fluid dynamic and system-level modeling, including a mechanistic representation of a Terry turbine/pump, for Fukushima Daiichi Unit 2. Until this recent effort, mechanistic modeling had been confined to an otherwise coarse model of Fukushima Daiichi Unit 2 laden with manipulations of boundary conditions that substituted for detailed representations of the reactor, drywell, and wetwell. This work has provided insights in modeling uncertainties and provides confirmation for experimental efforts for the Terry turbopump. Analytical efforts ongoing at Sandia National Laboratories to understand the design and off-design operation of Terry turbines are introduced in this paper. The efforts are described mostly in the context of RCIC systems.