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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.
Kyra Jantschik, Oliver Czaikowski, Helge C. Moog, Klaus Wieczorek (GRS)
Proceedings | 16th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM 2017) | Charlotte, NC, April 9-13, 2017 | Pages 307-316
Cement-based salt concrete (mass concrete with crushed salt filler) and MgO (sorel) concrete are the building materials used for seals in repositories in salt formations. These structures are important elements to prevent the access of aqueous solutions to emplaced waste containments. The post-closure evolution of such cements is studied in detail at GRS in order to understand the long-term changes in their hydraulic conductivity. This includes CHM-coupled interactions between the concrete material and the host rock and formation water. This paper presents results from laboratory investigations of the sealing capacity of seal systems at laboratory scale in contact with various saline solutions.