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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.
Joe W. Durkee, Jr., Michael R. James, Gregg W. McKinney, Laurie S. Waters, Tim Goorley
Nuclear Technology | Volume 180 | Number 3 | December 2012 | Pages 336-354
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the Initial Release of MCNP6 / Radiation Transport and Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-22
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The interaction of radiation with matter can cause activation or fission reactions producing unstable residuals that decay with the emission of delayed-neutron and/or delayed-gamma radiation. This delayed radiation can be exploited for a variety of purposes, including homeland security, health physics, instrumentation and equipment design, and nuclear forensics. Here we report on capability that has been developed to provide automated simulations of delayed-neutron and/or delayed-gamma radiation using MCNP6. We present new high-fidelity delayed-gamma simulation results for models based on the neutron-fission experiments conducted by Beddingfield and Cecil to illustrate and validate this powerful feature.