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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.
Jacob P. Gorton, Nicolas R. Brown (Penn State), Soon Kyu Lee, Yonho Lee (Univ of New Mexico)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 1022-1027
We present the results of a preliminary comparison of low-pressure transient critical heat flux (CHF) tests conducted in a closed tube test section and best-estimate simulation results. We compare low-pressure experimental CHF test results for stainless steel 316 (SS316) and Inconel 600 test sections to results predicted by models developed in two widely-used thermal hydraulics codes; the system code RELAP5-3D and the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of LWRs (CASL) version of CTF. The objective of the comparison was to determine how well the models would predict CHF and post-CHF tube temperatures and rewetting behavior. The RELAP5-3D and CTF models conservatively predicted the heat flux at which CHF was exceeded for the SS316 models, but both codes showed that CHF was exceeded at a greater heat flux than in the experiment for the Inconel 600 case. RELAP5-3D and CTF overpredicted the post-CHF tube temperature in the SS316 model but underpredicted the Inconel tube temperature, thus demonstrating the need for improved CHF and post-CHF prediction methods for various materials.
