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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.
Timothy Ault, Steven Krahn (Vanderbilt Univ), Andrew Worrall (ORNL), Allen Croff (Vanderbilt Univ)
Proceedings | 16th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM 2017) | Charlotte, NC, April 9-13, 2017 | Pages 210-216
The synergy of light and heavy water reactors using both uranium and thorium has been examined for the primary purpose of managing transuranic radionuclide (TRU) production. Two variants of a two-reactor system, where the first reactor uses uranium oxide fuel and the second reactor uses thorium-based fuels with a transuranic component, are analyzed from the perspective of TRU management. One variant uses low-enriched uranium made from natural uranium and uranium recovered from reprocessing in the first reactor, while the other variant uses highly enriched uranium. Full recycle of all actinides was used to minimize the amount of transuranics requiring repository disposal, so that the only source of exiting transuranics is from losses associated with process inefficiencies. Both variants compare favorably with other fuel cycle options with regards to the quantity of transuranic elements requiring geological disposal on an energy-normalized basis.