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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.
Aarno Isotalo
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 180 | Number 3 | July 2015 | Pages 286-300
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE14-92
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Four schemes for coupling the neutronics and depletion in burnup calculations are compared in four assembly segment test cases with various step lengths. Three of the coupling schemes use only one transport solution per step. While none of the methods was superior in every test case or in every respect, there are significant differences that can make one or the other preferable in different applications. The fourth method included in the comparison is the one dubbed CE/CM in our previous study, which compares schemes that use two transport solutions per step. The methods using only one transport solution per step were found to be more accurate than CE/CM but less accurate than the newer LE/LI and LE/QI methods. In cases where desired output intervals, rather than accuracy, are the limiting factor for step lengths, methods using only one transport solution per step can still provide a major advantage even when compared to LE/LI and LE/QI. Significant differences were also observed in the propagation of the statistical uncertainty from Monte Carlo neutronics through the different methods. While this topic was not studied further, it seems that differences in error propagation may in some cases be as significant as those in accuracy.