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2026 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
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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.
Jonathan Perry, Adam Aaron, Chris Stone, Arnold Lumsdaine
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 8 | November 2023 | Pages 1178-1186
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2023.2177465
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Material Plasma Exposure eXperiment (MPEX) vacuum pumping system is responsible for creating prototypic conditions in the plasma material interaction chamber that mimic those in a fusion reactor divertor region. Additionally, the vacuum system needs to minimize the pressure in the plasma heating region to improve the coupling of the electron cyclotron heating and ion cyclotron heating to the plasma, minimizing waste heat exhausted to high heat flux components. The final design of the system has been sized to comply with the vacuum pump operating environment and to reduce the number of unique pumps required while meeting performance requirements. Bounding cases with and without the plasma present have been developed in the pumping analysis, and an initial calculation has been performed based on the plasma pumping identified in Proto-MPEX operation though this result will remain unverified until MPEX operation.