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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.
Igor A. Bolotnov (NCSU), invited
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 547-556
The presented review paper outlines the progress in the recent years of the high-resolution single and two-phase flow simulations of reactor-relevant flows. Rapid development of high-performance computing capabilities creates exciting opportunities to study complex reactor thermal hydraulic phenomena in future years. Today’s advances in thermal hydraulic analysis, machine learning techniques and interface resolved simulations will help pave the way to the next level of understanding of two-phase flow behavior in complex geometries. This paper consists of the two major parts: (i) history and review of interface tracking simulations for nuclear thermal hydraulics in recent years and (ii) several opportunities to apply those advanced tools in the future. First part will discuss typical computational methods used for those simulations, provide some examples of the past work, as well as computational cost estimates and affordability of such simulations for research and industrial applications. In the second part some specific examples are discussed which could be analyzed using exascale supercomputers being designed and projected to be online in the next several years. New generation methodologies are required in order to take full advantage of those capabilities to greatly enhance the scientific understanding of complex two-phase flow phenomena in nuclear reactors under normal operation and postulated accident conditions.