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August 24–27, 2026
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NRC issues draft EA/FONSI for Duane Arnold restart
Efforts by NextEra Energy to restart the Duane Arnold nuclear power plant as early as 2029 continue to move forward with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's preliminary environmental assessment and determination that the restart would have no significant environmental impacts.
On Thursday, the NRC posted a draft environmental assessment and a finding of no significant impact for the Palo, Iowa, facility; the Federal Register notice was published on Monday. The Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing is a cooperating agency on the draft EA, as the DOE is considering providing financial assistance to the restart project.
G. L. Kulcinski, J. F. Santarius, G. A. Emmert, R. L. Bonomo, G. E. Becerra, A. N. Fancher, L. M. Garrison, K. B. Hall, M. J. Jasica, A. M. McEvoy, M. X. Navarro, M. K. Michalak, C. M. Schuff
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 2 | September 2015 | Pages 314-318
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-934
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For nearly two decades, as many as 4 Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (IEC) devices have been operated simultaneously at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Over that time period we have learned that the early perceptions of how IEC devices operate are quite different from the actual performance in the Laboratory. Over the past 2 years we have gained even more understanding of IEC physics and technology. Experimental measurements and theoretical improvements have better characterized both the negative ions that contribute up to ~10% of the fusion rate in some cases and the neutral energy distributions in IEC devices at moderate pressure (0.07-0.7 Pa ≈ 0.5-5 mTorr). We also now understand more of why operation with helium plasmas has such a detrimental effect on high voltage performance of the traditional tungsten alloy grid wires. Most of the previous IEC work had been confined to < 100 kV with short operation times up to 150 kV. We have recently expanded our operating regime to ≈ 200 kV anode-cathode potential difference, which is, to our knowledge, the highest-voltage IEC operation reported in the worldwide IEC literature. Several design modifications were required to achieve steady state operation at these high voltages and some are described in this article.