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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.
Julio Diaz, Robert Adams, Victor Petrov, Annalisa Manera (Univ of Michigan)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 241-249
The work presented in this report describes the current status of the High-Resolution Gamma-ray Tomography System (HRGTS) under development at the University of Michigan (UM) for high-resolution measurements of void fractions in complex geometries such as fuel bundles and high-pressure test sections, including various test measurements. The system consists of a high-resolution fan-beam gamma tomography system based on an Ir-192 source and a custom modular detector array. The module arrangement is composed of eight detectors, each consisting of a LYSO (Lu1.9Y0.1SiO5) scintillator read out by two Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPMs) arranged in parallel for improved light collection. Custom pulse-processing electronic boards for each module amplify the analog signals and count events at two independently-defined pulse height thresholds per detector. The individual detector modules have WiFi capabilities so that the detector arc can be easily expanded, requiring only a single PC to operate the entire array remotely. Reconstructed images of test phantoms have confirmed a spatial resolution of about 1.5 mm. Further tests were performed using a static mock-up of a 5x5 fuel assembly. The complete detector arc is mounted on a rotating stage with a large inner hole of 470 mm in order to accommodate flow channels, such that the source and detector are rotated around the stationary channel in order to collect the range of projection angles needed to perform tomographic reconstruction.