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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.
C. A. Nixon, W. R. Marcum, A. W. Weiss (Oregon State Univ), K. M. Steer, R. B. Jackson, M. G. Martin (TerraPower)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 493-504
Presently there exist no experimental methods readily available to characterize the comprehensive motion of wire-wrapped pins for the purpose of measuring fluid structure interactions. Specifically, the dearth of capabilities lies in the need to capture pin-to-pin interactions within the bundle that do not have visual access. This study leverages upon recent previous efforts that have demonstrated the successful use of a distributed strain sensor (DSS) to characterize the motion of a single wire-wrapped pin under fluid flow and expands through use of multiple instrumented pins to characterize the simultaneous motion of pin-to-pin interaction. The outcome of this study demonstrates the direct measurement of pin-to-pin contact, rubbing and interaction over a range of relevant flow rates on a 19-pin wire-wrapped bundle.