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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.
Shuliang Ma, Jianhua Yang, Xiaofeng Han, Liang Guo, Yanlan Hu, Huajun Liu, Hao Wu, Yuanyuan Ma, Jichao Wang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 82 | Number 3 | April 2026 | Pages 626-635
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2025.2509010
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
During Paschen tests of fusion reactor magnets, it is essential to establish an insulation monitoring system to locate insulation faults. To provide reference data for the design of such a system, this paper first establishes a Paschen discharge experimental platform based on visible light imaging and then develops a discharge diagnostic system. Given the large accumulation of monitoring video files during discharge experiments, a discharge frame detection algorithm (DFD), based on histogram analysis and discrete point detection, is designed to improve the detection speed and accuracy the of discharge frames.
After testing the Paschen discharge experimental platform, it was found that the gas breakdown characteristics in nonuniform fields still follow the basic principles of Paschen’s law. Moreover, the change in plasma luminosity with vacuum pressure correlates to the behavior described by Paschen’s law. Finally, performance testing of the DFD algorithm shows that DFD achieves a F1 score of 99.4%, surpassing traditional detection algorithms based on edge detection and Fourier transform. The detection efficiency of DFD is 13 times and 21 times higher than these traditional methods, respectively.
The results of the Paschen discharge experimental platform tests demonstrate that monitoring gas discharge phenomena during Paschen tests with a visible light camera is highly feasible. The discharge diagnostic system, with its efficient and precise performance, can quickly capture nearly all discharge images, providing valuable experience for the technical development of magnet insulation monitoring systems.
