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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.
Dongjune Chang, Youho Lee (Univ of New Mexico)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 343-354
The research for packed Pebble-bed for Fluoride salt-cooled high temperature reactor, with its advantages of passive safety feature and higher thermal efficiency compared to conventional nuclear power plants, is developing actively by many research institutes. In this study, the authors introduce a new device which has non-invasive type measurements in order to figure out the statistical distribution of temperature and heat transfer performance of randomly packed spherical fuels. This device is made up with a metallic shell of 63.5mm diameter, and it contains a circuit board and battery to drive temperature measurements, wireless data transfer. The circuit board used for receive measured temperature from several K type thermocouples is based on the ATmega328 type Microprocessor (MCU). This board collects temperature at multiple points and send data to the receiver in a wireless way. The authors descript its communication protocol and driving method of the device. After that, the development process for configuring new concept wireless device was explained. In addition, heat generation from the inside of the spherical device was realized by using induction heating and fabric-based heating material. Preliminary results from the experiment on the wireless communication of multiple devices are presented. The statistical distribution of the local heat transfer coefficient for multiple packed-pebbles can be obtained by extending this preliminary experimental method.