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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.
Iztok Tiselj, Cedric Flageul, Jure Oder (Jožef Stefan Inst), invited
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 1050-1065
The paper discusses the most accurate methods for description of turbulent flows: computationally very expensive Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) and, slightly less accurate and slightly less expensive, Large Eddy Simulation (LES) method. Both methods have found the way into the nuclear thermal hydraulics as tools for studies of the fundamental mechanisms of turbulence and turbulent heat transfer. In the first Section of the paper, both methods are briefly introduced in parallel with the basic properties of the turbulent flows. The focus is on DNS method, the so-called quasi-DNS approach, and the coarsest turbulence modelling approach discussed in this work, which is still on the very small scale, wall-resolved LES. Other, coarser turbulence modeling approaches (such as wall-modelled LES, RANS/LES hybrids, or RANS) are beyond the scope of the present paper. Section 2. answers the question: "How do DNS and LES methods work?", with a short discussion of the computational requirements, numerical approaches and computational tools. Section 3. is about the interpretation of the DNS and LES results and statistical uncertainties. Sections 4. and 5. give some examples of the DNS and wall-resolved LES results relevant for nuclear thermal hydraulics. The last section lists the conclusions and some of the challenges, which might be tackled with the most accurate techniques like DNS and LES.