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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.
Glenn E. Hammond, Jennifer M. Frederick (SNL)
Proceedings | 16th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM 2017) | Charlotte, NC, April 9-13, 2017 | Pages 356-362
This paper discusses software design choices made during the ongoing development of PFLOTRAN with the intent of improving the longevity and flexibility of the code while maintaining robustness. PFLOTRAN is a massively parallel reactive multiphase flow and transport code employed to simulate subsurface processes in support of radioactive waste management licensing and performance assessment studies. PFLOTRAN’s open source licensing, software configuration management, object-oriented design through modern Fortran 2003/2008, approach to coupling scientific process models, and automated testing are discussed in detail.
