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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
Inesh Kenzhina, Mussa Kabiyev, Artem Kozlovskiy, Meiram Begentayev, Aktolkyn Tolenova, Petr Blynskiy
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 82 | Number 1 | January-February 2026 | Pages 461-470
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2025.2478774
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The main aim of this study is to determine the role of irradiation temperature on the mechanisms of softening of the surface layers of Nd2Zr2O7 ceramics, as well as to identify the effect of stabilizing additives on enhancement of the resistance to high-temperature destabilization of the damaged layer. Analysis of the effect of variations in irradiation temperature on the change in the strength properties of Nd2Zr2O7 ceramics and identification of the effect of addition of stabilizing MgO and Y2O3 additives on inhibition of the mechanisms of diffusion expansion of the damaged layer depth revealed that in the case of high-temperature irradiation, the effect of diffusion softening is more pronounced for unstabilized ceramics, while the formation of impurity inclusions in the composition inhibits the mechanisms of diffusion of point and vacancy defects. One of the key parameters for using the addition of stabilizing additives to ceramics is to contain the mechanisms of structural disorder associated with thermodynamic phase transitions of the “pyrochlore → highly defective fluorite” type, the formation of which leads to softening and degradation of the damaged layer. During the studies conducted, it was established that the addition of stabilizing additives to the composition of Nd2Zr2O7 ceramics leads to an increase in resistance to high-temperature degradation of strength properties, consisting in an increase in the threshold for reducing hardness depending on the irradiation temperature for stabilized ceramics in comparison with nonstabilized Nd2Zr2O7 ceramics.
