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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.
Qingbo Wang, Jingyuan Qu, Wenkai Zhu, Baichang Zhou, Jinxing Cheng
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 168 | Number 3 | July 2011 | Pages 287-292
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE10-65
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The radon adsorption ability of four samples of coconut shell-based activated carbons has been investigated by measuring the dynamic adsorption coefficient (DAC) of each activated carbon in a radon room. The findings obtained have shown that DACs are dramatically different even when the surface areas are near. Nitrogen adsorption and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy analysis are used to study the microstructure of the four samples. The results have shown that micropores with diameters between 0.5 and 0.8 nm play the most important role in radon adsorption on activated carbons. Oxygen on the pore surface influences radon adsorption because of the polarity molecular adsorption on oxygen groups.
