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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.
Alexis Maldonado, Christopher Perfetti
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 8 | August 2023 | Pages 2086-2098
Technical papers from: PHYSOR 2022 | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2162782
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
When designing experiments for full-scale reactor systems, the Monte Carlo N-Particle® and Whisper codes can be used to create neutronic models and compare the similarity of two nuclear systems via correlation coefficients for , the effective multiplication factor. This paper applies this framework to a conceptual heat pipe yttrium-hydride-moderated microreactor system and experiments, but the method can be applied generally to any nuclear reactor design. The framework is intended as a supplement to other neutronics/thermal/multiphysics analyses and provides an objective method to measure the neutronic similarity of two systems. By analyzing the shared nuclear data uncertainty, as well as sensitivity to nuclear data over all neutron energies, highly informative experiments can be designed to aid in the development of microreactor and other advanced reactor technologies and systems.