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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.
L. C. Cadwallader
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 26 | Number 3 | November 1994 | Pages 1021-1024
Tritium Technology, Safety, Environment, and Remote Maintenance | Proceedings of the Eleventh Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy New Orleans, Louisiana June 19-23, 1994 | doi.org/10.13182/FST94-A40289
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
As fusion experiments grow in size, power, and tritium fuel consumption, the safety analyses for these experiments become more important for regulatory approval. With current trends in using probabilistic safety techniques, the need for component failure rate data for radioactivity confinement components has grown. This paper presents the results of a literature review for vacuum component reliability. Point estimate average failure rates and error factors are given for a wide variety of vacuum components used for fusion experiments.
