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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.
Mingfu He, Youho Lee (Univ of New Mexico)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 449-459
The critical heat flux (CHF) sets the upper limit of efficient heat removal for pool boiling. Microstructures fabricated on a heat transfer substrate can effectively increase the limit of heat removal and delay the boiling crisis. The exact physics mechanisms behind microstructure enhancement still remain ambiguous and CHF prediction on microstructured surfaces is not well resolved even if numerous related studies and experiments have been performed. In this study, the deep belief network (DBN) is proposed to predict CHF and study parametric trends of CHF by collecting relevant CHF datasets from published papers. Performance comparisons with other four common machine learning techniques and three modified Zuber models accounting for the effects of microstructures are conducted for exploring complicated and nonlinear relation between CHF and microstructures. Different from the training process of other regression modelling problems, a special model convergence, which is defined in Subsection 3.1, is required to be incorporated into the CHF model of DBN for exhibiting accurate parametric trends of CHF and improving the prediction accuracy. Numerical results demonstrate that DBN can achieve the best performance of CHF prediction in terms of prediction accuracy. The presented methodology provides new insights for CHF modelling in pool boiling enhanced by microstructures.