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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.
Collin S. Dunn, Bamidele Ebiwonjumi, Stefano Segantin, Kevin B. Woller, Weiyue Zhou, Ethan E. Peterson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 82 | Number 4 | May 2026 | Pages 881-900
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2025.2504844
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fusion pilot plants (FPPs) will require tritium self-sufficiency, which is achieved through the breeding blanket. The liquid immersion blanket (LIB) concept employing liquid breeders has been shown to reduce complexity and costs, but the most popular candidate for LIBs, FLiBe, contains highly toxic beryllium. In order to attain tritium self-sufficiency without the drawbacks of high toxicity, lithium-chloride lithium-fluoride (ClLiF) molten salt is suggested as an alternative liquid breeding candidate.
This work analyzes the viability of ClLiF from a neutronics perspective using the OpenMC transport code. Simulations with a simple, ideal blanket neutronics model with no first wall or structural materials were carried out and revealed that ClLiF enriched in 37Cl is competitive with FLiBe in terms of both the tritium breeding ratio (TBR) and energy multiplication . Next, a scan across salt temperatures, neutron multiplier materials, neutron multiplier thicknesses, LiCl fractions, 37Cl enrichments, and 6Li enrichment was conducted to identify the parameters that improve ClLiF performance.
These improved parameters were then applied to a more realistic model of a compact, toroidal reactor with a first wall and structural materials. The results from this model demonstrated that a blanket made up of ClLiF, enriched in 37Cl, achieved a TBR greater than that of FLiBe, but had a reduced energy multiplication unless a thicker external beryllium layer was introduced. Last, the effects of nuclear data and density uncertainties on the TBR and were quantified, and uncertainties in 35Cl nuclear data resulted in the greatest source of uncertainty in the calculation of the TBR and . However, a new evaluation of 35Cl cross sections by Los Alamos National Laboratory with lower uncertainty led to greater TBRs and ME’s than those calculated using the ENDF/B-VIII.0 and TENDL-2019 libraries.
