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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.
Mustafa Alper Yildiz, Yassin Hassan (Texas A&M), Haomin Yuan, Elia Merzari (ANL)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 659-669
Helical coil steam generator (HCSG) is a specific type of shell and tube heat exchanger known for having higher heat transfer coefficient than many other designs. For this reason, they are considered in Small Modular Reactor (SMR) and High Temperature Reactor (HTR) designs. Investigation of flow behavior in HCSGs is important for better design. In this paper we present our study on modeling of the coolant flow in the primary side of the HCSG. We used Nek5000, open source, high-order spectral element CFD code developed in Argonne National Laboratory. Nek5000 accepts only hexahedral mesh, which makes very challenging the meshing process for the complicated HCSG geometry. Tet-to-hex meshing strategy was applied to by-pass the geometric complexities. Tetrahedral mesh was created first, and then each tetrahedral element was converted to four hexahedral elements. Boundary layers were extruded to fit the exact geometry. In this study large eddy simulation (LES) was performed at Reynolds number of 9000 based on the inlet velocity and the tube diameter. The employed sub-grid scale model for the LES relies on explicit filtering.