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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.
Nicolae Bobolea, Randy Ellison, Joshua Parker (U.S. Fuels, Framatome)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 1271-1284
Framatome is developing a realistic non-LOCA safety evaluation methodology to assess PWR plant response under accident conditions based on coupled multi-physics simulations employing a 3D transient core simulator, a 3D core thermal-hydraulics, a system thermal-hydraulics and a fuel thermal-mechanical codes. Industrial deployment of such complex methodology required the development of an advanced execution platform capable of integrating multi-physics simulation codes while providing flexibility to express the methodology processes through a modular platform design. The execution platform architecture relies on versatile building blocks with functionality entirely controlled through user inputs. The platform offers deterministic parameter modeling and statistical parameter uncertainty sampling for simulation code inputs to define Design of Experiments and Monte Carlo evaluations whose management and execution uses an optimized Directed Acyclic Graph algorithm capable of handling a large number of simulations and seamlessly interfacing with High Performance Computing job schedulers.