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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.
Garland Porter, Marilyn Delgado, Yassin Hassan (Texas A&M)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 919-925
Pressure Sensitive Paint (PSP) was investigated as a potential measurement technique for studying advanced heat exchanger designs. An experiment was setup to emulate a single rod in a helical coil steam generator (HCSG) being subjected to flow. Background, wind-off, and wind-on images were taken with a CCD camera while the PSP was under excitation light from a UV lamp. Instantaneous images were taken at 7 fps at Re 30,000. Analysis of the pressure field images found the average wind-off pressure to be 102.49 kPa and the average wind-on pressure to be 103.24 kPa. Such small changes in pressure can be verified with dynamic pressure transducer measurements also taken at the surface of the rod. The present study only discusses the results from the instantaneous pressure sensitive paint images captured from the experiment. Future work looks to make use of the sensitivity of pressure field measurements the PSP is capable of within a larger scale helical coil steam generator model.