ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
May 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2026
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
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.
Zhiqiang Chen, Jingjing Chen, Shuangbao Shu, Ziqiao Yu, Yuzhong Zhang, Xiaojie Tao, Xianli Lang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 10 | October 2022 | Pages 1255-1265
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2072660
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Monitoring the oil scale deposition thickness of pipelines is beneficial to ensuring the efficient and safe operation of pipelines. In this paper, an improved gamma-ray transmission method is proposed to reconstruct the two-dimensional (2D) oil scale profile of pipelines. The method combines the gamma-ray transmission method and scanning technology to measure the deposition thickness of the oil scale and rotates the gamma-ray scanning direction to different angles, after completing a transmission scanning process, to achieve the full-angle measurement of the oil scale deposition thickness. Based on this method, a set of oil scale profile detection devices is designed and the detection process is simulated by the Geant4 toolkit. In this system model, the pipelines with and without oil scale are scanned, respectively, by using the single-energy gamma-ray beam to analyze the relative transmittance of gamma rays at the energy of 0.662 MeV. The results show that the approach is efficient for detecting the deposition thickness of oil scale in oil pipelines and is accurate for the 2D oil scale profile reconstruction of a pipeline. The maximum deviation is about 0.59 cm, and the relative error is less than 5%.