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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.
S. Benhamadouche, M.-C. Gauffre, P. Badel (EdF)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 765-776
EDF aims at identifying what causes fuel assembly vibrations in Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR). The present work focuses on the validation of pressure fluctuations along the central rod of a 5×5 configuration for wall-modelled Large Eddy Simulation (LES). New experiments, called CALIFS, have been carried out by CEA (Atomic Energy Commission) on a 5×5 Mixing Vane Grid (MVG) in the framework of “Fuel Assembly” EDF/CEA/FRAMATOME tripartite project. In addition to pressure drop and velocity measurements using Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV), pressure measurements have been performed along the central rod. The computational domain is representative of a span of the experimental mock-up, composed of a 5×5 rod bundle equipped with a split-type mixing vane grid. The hydraulic Reynolds number is equal to 66,000 and periodic boundary conditions are imposed in the stream-wise direction. The mesh is fully hexahedral and conformal. Computations give very satisfactory results for the pressure drop, the mean velocity and the Reynolds stresses at different locations. The r.m.s. of the pressure along the central rod is also compared to experimental data at different heights. The behavior is in very good agreement up to 5 hydraulic diameters downstream the mixing vane grid.
