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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.
Yoshikazu Tamauchi, Takashi Miyata, Kazumi Takebe, Yoshiaki Hayashi, Shingo Matsuoka, Kazuya Hayashi, Katsuya Kurosu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 181 | Number 2 | February 2013 | Pages 303-316
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety/Reprocessing | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A15785
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a reprocessing plant, the various and many accidents identified related to mechanical processes, chemical processes, and storage facilities have to be assessed to know the total risk of the plant. To assess the individual risks of so many potential accidents efficiently and effectively, we have developed a simplified quantitative method called quantitative safety assessment (QSA), based on our experience in probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) for the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant and with reference to the integrated safety analysis used in the United States for fuel cycle facilities. Our method not only includes such PRA features as quantifiability of the results and comparability of risk importance of the contributors to accident sequences but also offers the new features of simplified presentation and easy traceability. The designation of important safety structures, systems, components, and personnel activities is thus facilitated through the use of the results of this method. In this paper, the deployment of the QSA method is demonstrated using an example of a criticality accident in a plutonium partition process.