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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.
Mingjun Wang, Tangtao Feng, Ping Song, Wenxi Tian, G. H. Su, Suizheng Qiu (Xi’an Jiaotong Univ)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 965-976
In this paper, the detailed thermal mixing characteristics of the two-phase stratified flow in a 45° T-junction were studied with complicated direct contact condensation. The feasibility of CFD model on the two phase mixing process was validated against the experimental data obtained from the XJTU-ECCS apparatus. Results show that the established two-phase CFD model can predict the mixing process correctly during the ECC safety injection with the matched grid, exact boundary conditions and a proper set of mathematical model. Moreover, with a comparison between the condensation rate and the experimental data under different Rt numbers, it was found that the error range of numerical results turned out to be lower than 28%. The condensation rate during the ECC injection was closely related to the Rt number, and the linearity degree between the condensation rate and Rt number was high when the cooling capacity of injection coolant was insufficient. This study summarized a fitting correlation according to simulation results, which can be used to predict the condensation rate in case that the Rt number is lower than 0.55.