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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.
Egor S. Afanasenko, Dmitri V. Portnov, Julia G. Vysokikh, Yuri A. Kashchuk
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 82 | Number 4 | May 2026 | Pages 805-813
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2025.2476818
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
MCNP is actually the only code in use at ITER for neutron transport modeling. The OpenMC software package is a potential alternative to it. At least, the OpenMC code can be a complement for preliminary evaluations, lost particle elimination, weight calculations for variance reduction, and similar tasks. OpenMC presents powerful and convenient functionality for these tasks. The essential advantage of OpenMC is that it is available as an open-source code. This allows one to adapt the code for one’s specific tasks. The project is supported by more than 100 developers from all around the world. The pace of the code development is excellent because of the experienced team, sound engineering process, and applied modern technologies. This paper discusses the use of the OpenMC code for ITER neutronics modeling, translation and synchronization of the models between MCNP and OpenMC, and some verification results.
