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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.
Afaque Shams, Dante De Santis (NRG), Adam Padee, Tobiasz Jarosiewicz, Piotr Wasiuk, Tomasz Kwiatkowski, S?awomir Potempski (National Centre for Nuclear Research)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 625-635
This paper presents technical aspects of large-scale direct numerical simulation (DNS) using high performance computing (HPC) cluster. It is divided in two parts. The first part contains a detailed description of HPC infrastructure used for the task, located in ?wierk Computing Centre (CI?), Poland. The description includes hardware configuration, software used for on-demand deployment of dedicated subclusters, and finally queuing and storage systems. The second part presents the large-scale simulations performed using this HPC cluster. In this regard, a highly scalable CFD code NEK5000 has been used to perform the DNS of two important thermal-hydraulic problems within the nuclear industry, i.e. pressurized thermal shock and inter-channel mixing in a bare rod bundle configuration.
