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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.
Akihiro Uchibori, Tatashi Takata (JAEA), Hideki Yanagisawa (NESI Corp.), Jiazhi Li, Sunghyon Jang (The Univ of Tokyo)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 1289-1294
When pressurized water or vapor leaks from a failed heat transfer tube in steam generators of sodium-cooled fast reactors, a high-velocity and high-temperature jet with sodium-water chemical reaction may cause tube failure propagation. In this study, a numerical analysis method to predict occurrence of failure propagation by overheating rupture was constructed to expand application range of an existing computer code. Applicability of this method was investigated through the numerical analysis of the experiment on water vapor discharging in liquid sodium. In this experiment, one tube for water vapor discharging and the 91 target tubes were placed in a liquid sodium pool. The numerical analysis showed that the temperature of the target tubes increased by the effect of the reacting jet. Some of them near the initial water leak point resulted in overheating rupture as with the experimental result. Although the proposed analysis method is very helpful for design and safety assessment, this method provides temperature distribution more widely than the real situation. To improve this conservativeness, a Lagrangian particle model for simulating reacting jet was also developed as an alternative method. The numerical results by the program unit of this model showed that the discharged gaseous particles repeated collision with the target tubes and moved along the inverse gravity direction.