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.
Bennet Krasch, Robin Größle, Daniel Kuntz, Sebastian Mirz
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 4 | May 2020 | Pages 481-487
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1718841
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A crucial part of the closed fuel cycle of future fusion power plants will be isotope separation, which takes place in a cryogenic distillation refraction column, where all six hydrogen isotopologues are separated due to their different vapor pressures at a given temperature. For monitoring and process controlling, the Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe has investigated liquid hydrogen by infrared (IR) absorption spectroscopy and presented the first successful calibration for the inactive isotopologues. Now, the new Tritium Absorption InfraRed Spectroscopy 2 (T2ApIR) experiment, which is fully tritium compatible, is under construction and aims to provide a calibration for concentration measurements of all six hydrogen isotopologues in solid, liquid, and gaseous phases via not only IR absorption but also Raman spectroscopy. One major challenge of the new experiment so far has been the design of the cryostat, which had to fulfill diverse technical and safety requirements regarding tritium compatibility, cryogenics, and overpressure and the combination of optical components for Raman and IR spectroscopy.