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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.
Joseph A. Christensen, R. A. Borrelli
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 11 | November 2022 | Pages 1333-1348
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2087832
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work uses evaluated criticality safety benchmarks to examine the effect of heterogeneity in high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) systems. A subset of benchmarks selected based on their composition parameters is slightly modified to artificially introduce heterogeneity, and the difference in the effective multiplication factor between the homogeneous benchmark and the modified model is determined. The difference in the multiplication factor is evaluated for correlations against both the moderator ratio and the enrichment of the benchmarks, and the correlations are examined using established statistical methods. In several cases, statistically significant correlations are observed and discussed, and the lack of expected correlations is also discussed.