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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. Mignot, S. Balderama (Oregon State Univ), N. Woolstenhulme (INL), W. Marcum (Oregon State Univ)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 892-903
Pulse generated in the Transient Reactor Test facility at Idaho National Laboratory can reach a minimum full width at half maximum of 100 ms. for a maximum power of 5500 MW with the current configuration. To reproduce conditions of a Reactivity Insertion Accident postulated for Light Water Reactor, the width of the pulse shall decrease down below 50 ms. to increase even more the maximum power. To reach this goal, it is intended to initiate higher power transient that could quickly be clipped to maintain the total energy deposition within the 2500 MJ limit of the reactor operation license. One of the pulse clipping options under consideration is the implementation of a fast-negative reactivity insertion system by injecting helium 3 in the core. Initial calculation shows that to ensure fast clipping of the pulse, the new system, in a form of a cartridge pre-inserted in the core, shall undergo a quick pressurization from near vacuum to minimum density of 2.2 kg/m3 in less than 5 ms. The HENRI (Helium 3 Negative Reactivity Insertion) facility has been designed and built at the Oregon State University to test the feasibility of such system, design a fast response pressurization system and test the repeatability of the process. To support this task, preliminary CFD calculations are performed. In this first stage of the project, only the gas dynamics part of the process is considered. Initial results show that the ultimate atomic density could physically be reached within the 5 ms. limit assuming an ultra-fast opening device.