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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.
G. D. Latimer, W. R. Marcum (Oregon State Univ), W. F. Jones (INL)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 777-788
In this study, two pool blowdown experiments were conducted on simulated PWR fuel rods filled with spherical lead pellets as a surrogate fuel having similar density to UO2. These experiments were performed at conditions similar to those expected during the second heatup phase of a loss-of-coolant accident in a conventional light water reactor. The rods were pressurized with a small volume of nitrogen gas at 4.0 MPa to rapidly expel the surrogate fuel particles through a pre-fabricated rupture in the rod. Subsequent dispersion of the particles was captured with a high-speed camera at an acquisition rate of 800 frames per second in order to properly record the transient at a resolved time scale. Initial images revealed contrasting mechanical behavior in the case of a single rod when compared to that in a representative 5x5 section of a fuel bundle. Pressure history on each experiment showed that there is not a significant difference in the depressurization rates of rods with or without the surrogate fuel. Selected particles were tracked in each experiment and overlaid to visualize the differences in the effective range. For the case of the bundle, most of the particles are deposited in the adjacent subchannels, while for the single rod, the mean free path is much longer. Calculated particle displacement and velocity trajectories are compared against theoretical models based on a force balance of a single particle, and show good agreement, with possible errors arising in the transient nature of the drag coefficient, and uncertainties in particle mass.