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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.
R. Dubey, Gokuldas H., K. Czerski, M. Kaczmarski, A. Kowalska, N. Targosz-Ślęczka, S. Thulichery, M. Valat
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 82 | Number 3 | April 2026 | Pages 572-585
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2025.2520724
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the study of very low-energy fusion reactions, where the cross section drops by many orders of magnitude, measuring the fusion products with minimal uncertainties and free from natural background interference is quite challenging. The present work focuses on qualitative and quantitative assessment of NE113 plastic scintillators, NE213 liquid scintillators, and NaI(Tl) detectors for such studies. All scintillator detectors are calibrated using standard gamma sources , , and and are compared with Geant4 Monte Carlo simulations. A gamma spectrum and neutron unfolding procedure is developed for these detectors with the help of these simulations. To verify this method, an experiment was performed to measure the fusion products from deuteron-deuteron fusion reactions induced by a 10-keV beam on a Zr metallic hydride environment. The results show that the NE113, NE213, and NaI(Tl) scintillator detectors, along with the developed gamma spectrum unfolding procedure, can qualitatively analyze complex gamma spectra with reasonable accuracy.