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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.
Wenxi Tian, Kuanghan Deng, (Xi’an Jiaotong Univ), Yun Wang (Xi’an Jiaotong Univ/Nuclear Power Inst of China), G. H. Su (Xi’an Jiaotong Univ)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 1133-1141
The flow boiling critical heat flux (CHF) of nanofluid in a vertical tube is affected by many influence factors, like type and concentration of nanofluid, pressure and mass flux. In this work, these influence factors was investigated experimentally. The results revealed that both AlN/H2O and Al2O3/H2O nanofluid could improve flow boiling CHF and enhancement rate could up to 18% maximally compared with deionized water. Nanofluid flow boiling CHF increases with increasing pressure, mass flux and diameter of test tube and decreases with increasing heating length of test tube. Meanwhile, the type and concentration of nanofluid has nearly no influence on CHF value. Furthermore, a mechanism which from the view point of nanoparticles deposition and adhering force of nanoparticles deposition layer was proposed to explain the CHF enhancement of nanofluid.
