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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.
Gang Jiang, Gang Chen, Weikun Ding, Yanghua Yang (State Power Investment Corporation Research Inst)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 388-398
After the Fukushima accident, the lessons involving in nuclear emergency management show that the emergency decision should enhance the capacity of analyzing and predicting severe accident. In order to improve this capability, the severe accident management training simulator (SAMTS) has been developed. This simulator has transplanted the self-developed integral severe accident code cosSA to the simulation platform to build the accident scenario, and coupled with computerized severe accident management guideline (CSAMG). The SAMTS provides several interventions to simulate different mitigation measures in SAMG, which help the operators handle to mitigate consequences and understanding the impact of mitigating actions on accident progression. This simulator could build the accident scene quickly to forecast and analysis to make central role of the information source for decision-making technical support in nuclear emergency management. The main purpose of this paper is to give a brief description of this simulator, including architecture, methodology, physical models of cosSA and a simulation case. Simulation results were compared with MELCOR (mainstream simulator calculation engine service) with the same initial and boundary conditions. Comparison results show that the calculation results of temperature, pressure and water level by SAMTS agree well with MELCOR. The good agreement proves the simulation capability of cosSA, which shows that cosSA could be applied into the severe accident simulator.