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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.
M. W. Patterson (INL), Kevin Terrill, Stephen Hancock, Joseph Warner (Univ of Idaho)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 317-330
An evaluation of a fluted tube, counter-flow heat exchanger (HEX), designed and optimized for heat transfer from the primary loop of a fast chloride salt reactor to an intermediate loop, is presented. The fluted-tube HEX was optimized for volume and pressure drop by altering tube length, flute number and pitch, and tube diameter for multiple commercially available fluted tubes. Three compositions of molten NaCl-KCl-ZnCl2 salt are used in the analysis. A fluted tube HEX design and salt composition are recommended and the HEX performance and physical size are compared to a conventional tube and shell HEX designed with tubes of equivalent diameter and length. Design of a fluted tube HEX and salt composition have the potential to improve the performance of Molten Chloride Salt Fast Reactors (MCSFRs). The MCSFR referenced in this evaluation is being developed by Elysium Industries and is a leading candidate for commercial deployment.
