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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.
John S. Hendricks, Brian J. Quiter
Nuclear Technology | Volume 175 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 150-161
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 16th Biennial Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division / Radiation Transport and Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-17
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The angular distribution of scattered photons is incorrect in MCNPX and MCNP5 because the incoherent and coherent form factors are obsolete. The obsolete data affect all photon transport problems with E > 74 keV. Elastic backscatter for E > 105 keV is completely missing. Consequently, a new ACE-format photoatomic data library, tentatively named MCPLIB05 and referred to herein as MCPLIB05T, has been developed for MCNP/X. Data in MCPLIB05T other than form factors are identical to that in its predecessor photoatomic library, MCPLIB04. The new form factor data in MCPLIB05T come directly from ENDF/B-VII (rev. 0) and are in a format incompatible with older versions of MCNP/X. Consequently, a new version of MCNP/X has been developed to identify and use the new MCPLIB05T data and yet retain backward compatibility, including tracking, when MCPLIB04 is used. The NJOY nuclear data processing system is undergoing development to enable future generations of photoatomic data libraries with modern form factor data in the new format.