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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.
Daniel Nunez, Benedikt Krohn, Victor Petrov, Annalisa Manera (Univ of Michigan)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 904-918
Over recent decades, Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) has become an increasingly common optical technique used to study fluid flows. As a result, large quantities of PIV data are becoming readily available for the development and validation of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) codes. The CFD community heavily relies on experimental data, and the experimental community should focus on an important quality that is often overlooked – the repeatability and the reproducibility of PIV data. Unfortunately, with advanced instrumentation such as a PIV system, slight variations in equipment setup can be sources of discrepancies in the measurements. In the present work, we discuss the level of repeatability and reproducibility of PIV results obtained in the Reactor Cavity Cooling System (RCCS) separate-effects test facility – a facility that aims to provide a high-resolution experimental database to be used to further develop the predictive capabilities of system and CFD codes. We examine the repeatability and reproducibility of the mean velocity and Reynolds stresses for the experiment of six rectangular jets with jet Reynolds numbers of 1.38×104. Furthermore, we discuss the convergence of the mean velocity and Reynolds stresses and some discrepancies observed between separate measurements. By conducting a few PIV measurements to verify the repeatability and reproducibility of the data, we gained insight into how much variation is present between separate measurements – an important quantity that should be included when providing uncertainty bands for PIV data.