ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
May 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2026
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
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.
Kevin J. Connolly (ORNL), Ronald B. Pope (ANL)
Proceedings | 16th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM 2017) | Charlotte, NC, April 9-13, 2017 | Pages 336-343
The US Department of Energy (DOE) established the Nuclear Fuels Storage and Transportation Planning Project (NFST) to lay the groundwork for implementing interim storage of spent nuclear fuel (SNF), including associated transportation. NFST became the Integrated Waste Management Program (IWM) in October 2016. The United States does not currently operate a large-scale transportation system for SNF, but there is extensive experience worldwide in safely transporting SNF. Under NFST, a review of publicly available information on the transportation of SNF (worldwide) was conducted in an effort to construct a historical record of SNF shipments. Estimates were developed to ascertain the number of fuel assemblies shipped, the number of metric tons of SNF shipped, and the number of shipments made between 1962 and 2016, worldwide. Data for some countries is incomplete or not available, so quantities reported in this paper are lower-bound estimates. However, from this review, it can be concluded that:
• At least 25,400 cask shipments have been made worldwide, but the actual number likely exceeds 44,000. It is also likely that significantly more cask shipments have been made for all forms of SNF considered here. The shipments made within and into the United States account for approximately 10%–17% of this total.
• The quantity of SNF shipped worldwide to date is at least 87,000 metric tons of heavy metal (MTHM) and likely more than 109,000 MTHM. This is considered a lower bound since many of the data sources did not report on the heavy metal quantities shipped. Of the quantities reported here, the US accounts for only about 5%–7% of the total.
Additionally, the study identified that at least 130 cask shipments of vitrified high-level radioactive waste (HLW) containing more than 2,350 canisters of HLW have been reprocessed at the plant in La Hague, France, and shipped back to the countries where they had initially been irradiated.
