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.
M. Zucchetti, L. Candido, Z. Hartwig, R. Po’, S. Segantin, R. Testoni, D. Whyte
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 6 | August 2019 | Pages 423-428
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1613141
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The new Affordable Robust Compact (ARC) fusion reactor, which, compared to larger machines like ITER, aims to achieve its goal of fusion energy in a less expensive and smaller but even more powerful and faster way with new high-field, high-temperature superconducting magnets, has been designed in the United States. The research tokamak aimed at the development of many ARC technologies is called SPARC. Ignitor is the proposed compact high-field tokamak that shares some design concepts with SPARC and ARC and shows the convenience of this tokamak design development line. Neutronics and radiation damage scoping studies have been carried out for both designs. A general-purpose macroscopic model set up by some of the authors in previous studies has been used to estimate the radiation damage on selected machine components for the two cases. Solutions to solve the problem of radiation damage of the toroidal field coil and poloidal field coil materials have been explored.