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.
Lingrui Li, Zijia Zhao, Yanyun Ma, Zhe Ma, Jiang Lai, Yunliang Zhu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 78 | Number 6 | August 2022 | Pages 475-489
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2049121
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
With the development of magnetic confinement fusion (MCF), it has become feasible for fusion energy to solve the future energy crisis. High-energy neutrons are produced during the fusion reaction. Neutron shielding and the tritium breeding ratio in MCF require a neutron source of high precision. In traditional methods, the neutron source is supposed to be isotropic. However, the double-differential cross sections for nuclear fusion given in the ENDF/B-VI database make it possible to calculate the neutron direction distribution in deuterium-tritium (D-T) plasma. In this study, a Maxwellian reactivity rate database is obtained by extracting double-differential cross-section data from the ENDF/B-VI database and then revising it. Monte Carlo and discrete ordinate methods are used to simulate transportation and fusion in D-T plasma and obtain the angular distribution of the neutron generation rate. The results of a preliminary numerical simulation in a simple model tell us that the difference between anisotropy and isotropy can reach an average of 4.6%. A temperature-corrected double-differential cross-section database and a numerical simulation method are developed to calculate the angular distribution of the neutron generation rate.