ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
May 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2026
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
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.
Jeffrey Doody, Robert Granetz, Bruce Lipschultz, Han Zhang, Peter Titus, Rui Vieira
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 2 | August 2013 | Pages 320-324
Divertor and High-Heat-Flux Components | Proceedings of the Twentieth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE-2012) (Part 1), Nashville, Tennessee, August 27-31, 2012 | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A18097
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new outer divertor is being designed for installation on Alcator C-Mod. This divertor will be toroidally continuous such that the currents during a disruption will be driven in the toroidal direction and not cross Alcator's large toroidal field and it eliminates leading edges. However, currents will still cross the poloidal fields, and so it is important to properly predict the poloidal fields in the area of the divertor so that we can properly predict the loads on the divertor during a disruption. To that end, an ANSYS model has been built which can predict the fields and field transients in C-Mod given two inputs, the currents for the toroidal and poloidal field coils which come from measured data taken during a discharge, and the current in the plasma, which comes from another model that solves Maxwell's equations to reconstruct the plasma as 24 current carrying filaments. The advantage of using this method to predict fields is that it provides the ability to create a model based on actual measured data and to model whichever type of disruption, whether a midplane disruption or a vertical displacement event, is deemed necessary for the design. The ANSYS model then is able to predict the fields, including the shielding effects of the structures in the vessel, and the currents induced in the vessel and these structures. These results can then be mapped to a sub-model of the divertor to predict loading and stress during the disruption.