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Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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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.
Technical Session|Panel|Sponsored by MCD
Monday, June 13, 2022|1:00–2:45PM PDT|Avila B
Session Chair:
Tara M. Pandya (ORNL)
Session Organizer:
Alternate Chair:
Madicken Munk (Univ. Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Integration and Collaboration with Other Fields: How to incorporate ideas and learning from other areas of science/engineering outside of mathematics, computational science, and computational nuclear engineering. Although everything we do as part of the nuclear mathematics and computation world is amazing (at least we like to think so), we as a field can gain great benefit from incorporating ideas from other fields of science and engineering outside of our traditional resource fields. This benefit can come from incorporating methods and ideas from published research as well as through collaboration. Panelists will explore best practices, examples, and lessons learned based on experiences incorporating developments from other fields of science and engineering outside of our typical areas of mathematics, applied mathematics, computer science, and of course, computational nuclear engineering. The questions we hope to discuss in this roundtable will include: What other applied fields should we be partnering with and looking to learn from? How do we better collaborate and learn from other fields of research? Are there resources/practices that could enable better collaboration among these applied computational fields?
Zeyun Wu
Virginia Commonwealth Univ.
Kyle Niemeyer
Oregon State
Jennifer Steers
Cedars Sinai
Lindsay Shuller-Nickles
Clemson Univ.
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