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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.
Tobias Lindborg (SKB/Swedish Univ of Agricultural Sciences), Graham Smith (GMS Abingdon Ltd.), Mike Thorne (Mike Thorne and Assoc Ltd)
Proceedings | 16th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM 2017) | Charlotte, NC, April 9-13, 2017 | Pages 105-112
Environmental change in post-closure safety assessment for radioactive waste disposal is recognised as an issue in international recommendations, national regulatory requirements and safety assessment practice. The key drivers of environmental change are associated with climate change. The major implications for post-closure safety relate to consequent changes in hydrology and landscape, in turn having knock-on implications for model representation of the containment system and the biosphere, as well as radionuclide migration and accumulation within them. This paper presents work recently completed in working group 6 of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s MODARIA program, which focussed on “Development of a Common Framework for Addressing Climate Change in Post-Closure Radiological Assessment of Solid Waste Disposal”. The results include an overall methodology for taking climate change and landscape development into account in post-closure radiological impact assessments. It is intended to be applicable to a wide range of disposal facility types and provide a common, scientifically supported, basis for addressing these complex issues in assessments. The methodology is illustrated by a range of examples from on-going work at the national or project specific level, that indicate how the common approach can be applied to address locally relevant assessment specific contextual factors. Continuing activities in carrying the results forward are also briefly presented. These include the update of the reference biospheres methodology within the international BIOPROTA program and the trial application of the approach to further sites and facilities. The implications for long-term assessment of sites under long-term rehabilitation are also discussed