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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.
Huajian Chang (State Nuclear Power Technology R&D Cente/Tsinghua Univ), Yuquan Li, Bin Gao, Cheng Li, Yanfang Xue, Nang Wang (State Nuclear Power Technology R&D Center)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 1155-1168
The passive safety system is more reliable and simpler than the conventional active safety system. However, the driving force in a passive safety is relatively low, some phenomena and the mechanisms remain unclear, the interactions and the synergistic effects even make the safety analysis complicated. Therefore, it calls a great demand to conduct both the separate and integral effect tests for assessing the passive safety system performance and validating the correlations or models used in the safety analysis codes. In this paper, the passive safety system test activities conducted for AP600, AP1000 and CAP1400 are reviewed. The ROSA, APEX and SPES were used for AP600 and AP1000 PXS integral test, and for CAP1400, the ACME was designed and built based on the previous test experiences. The LST was built for AP600 containment test, and the CERT was built for CAP1400 containment test with the detailed scaling analysis. The ULPU test facilities were used for AP600 and AP1000 IVR tests, and the FIRM used the real RV material for the CAP1400 IVR test. In this work, the main test facilities design and the test results for the passive safety PWR are presented, and the comparisons among the same type test facilities are also given to highlight the improvements of the passive safety tests.
