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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.
2022 ANS Annual Meeting
Nuclear Engineering Ph.D. Candidate
University of Tennessee
Alyssa Hayes (she/her) is a Nuclear Engineering Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Tennessee, where she is researching impurity transport in the plasma boundary of fusion reactors. She is a member of the Fusion Energy Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she takes advantage of high-performance computing resources to simulate wall erosion and impurity migration.
She is now a leader of the Computational Research Access Network (CRANE), a national student-led workshop series that teaches computational skills to students from underrepresented groups in plasma physics and nuclear engineering.
Her advocacy efforts began in 2016 when she joined forces with other nuclear advocates to help save the Clinton and Quad Cities NPPs. She testified in 2021 before Illinois Congressmembers to help save Byron and Dresden, and again in 2022 in a push to lift the Illinois moratorium on new nuclear construction.
Alyssa earned her B.S. in Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering from the University of Illinois in 2019. She continues to be an active member of ANS, WIN, CRANE, and Generation Atomic, and she aspires to become an ANS Congressional Fellow in the future.
Last modified April 14, 2022, 5:50am PDT
