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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.
Yang Liu, Shanbin Shi, Yalan Qian, Xiaodong Sun (Univ of Michigan), Nam Dinh (NCSU)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 1028-1040
Multiphase computational fluid dynamics (MCFD) is a promising tool to predict fully turbulent gas-liquid two-phase flows with high resolution. As a complex model, extensive validation and uncertainty quantification are required for an M-CFD solver before it can be trusted for large-scale industrial applications. In this paper, the inverse uncertainty quantification based on Bayesian inference is performed to quantify the uncertainty of the turbulence model in STAR-CCM+. As an inverse approach, the Bayesian approach requires experimental measurements to conduct the inference. In this work, high-resolution turbulence data measured by particle image velocimetry are used. The turbulence model with standard wall function and bubble-induced turbulence is considered. Supported by the PIV data, the uncertainties of the coefficients in the model are quantified, based on which the uncertainties of the solver predictions are evaluated. The Bayesian inference is conducted with the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method, based on a surrogate model constructed with Gaussian Process. It is found that the uncertainty of the turbulent kinetic energy is consistent with the measured data. However, it is also found that the liquid velocity is overestimated in the bulk flow region and underestimated in the near wall flow region compared to the measurement data. Such moderate discrepancies between the solver predictions and measurements require a more comprehensive evaluation that takes all relevant closure relations into consideration.