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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.
2022 ANS Annual Meeting
Associate Professor and Steve Hsu Keystone Research Faculty ScholarAlan Levin Department of Mechanical and Nuclear EngineeringCarl R. Ice College of Engineering
Kansas State University
Faculty Scientist
KSU Johnson Cancer Research Center
Amir A. Bahadori is an associate professor and Steve Hsu Keystone Research Faculty Scholar in the Alan Levin Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering at Kansas State University. He earned BS degrees in Mechanical Engineering with Nuclear Engineering Option and Mathematics from KSU in 2008. Bahadori attended graduate school at the University of Florida, earning the MS in Nuclear Engineering Sciences in 2010 and the PhD in Biomedical Engineering in 2012. Bahadori was employed at NASA Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center from 2010 to 2015, with work focused on astronaut radiation risk projection and assessment, space radiation dosimetry using active pixel detectors, and space radiation transport with deterministic and Monte Carlo-based codes. He returned to KSU as an assistant professor in 2015 and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2021, where he teaches courses in nuclear/radiological engineering and conducts research with focus areas in radiation protection, radiation transport applications, and semiconductor detector modeling and simulation. Bahadori has been certified in the comprehensive practice of health physics by the American Board of Health Physics since 2015. He was a student member of ANS from 2005-2011 and rejoined the Society in 2016. Since then, he has served ANS as Secretary of RPSD (2019-2021), RPSD Technical Program Chair (2021-present), RPSD Executive Committee Member (2021-Present), Rapid Response Taskforce Member (2021-Present), and Environmental and Siting Consensus Committee Full Member (2021-Present). Bahadori led the recent revision to ANS Position Statement 41 on Risks of Exposure to Low-Level Ionizing Radiation and the corresponding Background Information document.
Last modified April 14, 2022, 7:14am PDT
