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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.
Shameem Hasan, Tushar K. Ghosh, Mark A. Prelas, Dabir S. Viswanath, Veera M. Boddu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 159 | Number 1 | July 2007 | Pages 59-71
Technical Paper | Reprocessing | doi.org/10.13182/NT07-A3856
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Chitosan was coated on an inert substrate, perlite, and was prepared as spherical beads for adsorption of uranium from aqueous solutions. The uptake capacity of chitosan-coated perlite beads for uranium varied from 98.9 to 149 000 g/g when the equilibrium concentration of uranium in the solution ranged from 11 ppb (11 g/l) to 1000 ppm (10 × 106 g/l) and the solution pH was 5. The adsorption capacity of chitosan-coated perlite beads for uranium decreased by 75% in the presence of 0.45 M NaCl, whereas the adsorption capacity decreased by 55% when TiO2 was added to the beads during their preparation. The adsorption capacity of TiO2-containing chitosan beads for uranium was found to be in the range of 2.5 to 40 g of uranium per gram of beads when the concentration of uranium was 39 to 734 g/l in the presence of 0.45 M NaCl. It was in the range of 18 to 302 g of uranium per gram of beads when the concentration was 990 to 47 000 g/l in the presence of 0.45 M Na2CO3. Chitosan-coated beads were found to preferentially adsorb uranium, Cd, and Cr from a mixture containing these ions along with Sr and Cs. Only a negligible amount of Sr and Cs was adsorbed by chitosan-coated beads. The data suggest that the chitosan-coated beads can be used for both extraction of uranium from waste streams and also from a highly acidic medium such as a reprocessing stream that uses nitric acid.
