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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.
Koen Mannaerts (Fedeeral Agency for Nuclear Control), Graham Smith (GMS Abingdon Ltd.), Karen Smith (RadEcol Consulting Ltd.)
Proceedings | 16th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM 2017) | Charlotte, NC, April 9-13, 2017 | Pages 121-127
BIOPROTA is an international forum addressing key issues in biosphere aspects of assessment of the long-term impact of contaminant releases associated with disposal of radioactive waste. Membership includes operators, regulators, technical support organizations and academic institutions from N. America, Europe and Asia. The overall objective is to provide a forum for sharing and exploring the best sources of information to justify modelling assumptions made within long-term radiological assessments. Particular emphasis is placed on key data required for the assessment of long-lived contaminant migration and accumulation in the biosphere, and the associated radiological or other impact, following their discharge or release to the surface environment. Priorities are driven by assessment needs identified from previous and on-going assessment projects. Where common needs are identified within different assessment projects in different countries, a common effort is applied to finding solutions. A wide variety of published output has been produced since the forum’s inception in 2002, and is made freely available at www.bioprota.org. This paper presents information on the most recent and on-going collaborative project activities. These include: approaches to representing the geosphere-biosphere interface so as to provide a coherent explanation of contaminant dispersion in the near-surface environment; selection of appropriate spatial and temporal scales for people and wildlife in long-term safety assessments; improving confidence in dose assessments for C-14 based on model-data comparison exercises; a study of issues affecting the assessment of impacts of disposal of radioactive and hazardous waste, with the aim of development and application of more consistent assessment methods for disposal of wastes presenting both chemical and radiological hazards; and review and enhancement of the IAEA’s Reference Biospheres Methodology, taking account of a wide range of scientific, regulatory and methodological developments since the Methodology was published in 2003.
