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.
Arsen S. Iskhakov, Cheng-Kai Tai, Igor A. Bolotnov, Nam T. Dinh
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 10 | October 2023 | Pages 2527-2542
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2107864
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the future, advanced reactors are expected to play an important role in nuclear power. However, their development and deployment are hindered by the absence of reliable and efficient models for analysis of system thermal hydraulics (TH). For instance, mixing and thermal stratification in reactor enclosures cannot be captured by traditional one-dimensional system codes, yet usage of high-resolution solvers is computationally expensive. Recent developments of coarse grid (CG) and system codes with three-dimensional capabilities have shown that they are promising tools for system-level analysis. However, these codes feature large turbulence model form and discretization errors and require further improvements to capture turbulent effects during complex transients. Improvements can be achieved by using data-driven (DD) approaches. This paper provides an overview of recent applications of DD methods in the areas of fluid dynamics and TH. It is demonstrated that they are being widely applied for engineering-scale analysis (e.g., closures for large eddy simulations/Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes using direct numerical simulation data). However, they cannot be directly employed for the system scale because of some features of the latter: usage of CG, transient nature of the considered phenomena, nonlinear interaction of multiple closures, etc. At the same time, accumulated experience allows outlining of potential frameworks for further developments in DD CG modeling of system-level TH.