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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.
Sven Bader, Ashley Spry (AREVA Federal Services, LLC)
Proceedings | 16th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM 2017) | Charlotte, NC, April 9-13, 2017 | Pages 647-652
A methodology is described that allows for the direct comparison of many diverse objectives with an end result of a rank-ordered evaluation of options that reflects the decision makers' preferences. This methodology, the multi-attribute utility analysis (MUA), is utilized to establish a ranking of routes and associated modes of transport (e.g., truck, rail, barge) to move used/spent nuclear fuel (UNF/SNF) from independent spent fuel storage installations (ISFSIs) to a Class I carrier. Preliminary evaluations have been performed to identify viable modes of transport from some ISFSIs where the only remaining vestige of the reactor site is the ISFSI and hence, very little transportation infrastructure remains at these “stranded” sites for performing these shipments. The MUA is a structured methodology designed to handle the trade-offs among multiple objectives (i.e., attributes) and provides a transparent, rational, and defensible analysis that is easy to explain and communicate and has been used for decades to provide logically consistent analyses of options (i.e., modes and routes) that are intended to achieve more than one objective, where no single option dominates the others on all of those objectives. The ultimate result from the MUA is a list(s) of the most to the least favored/preferred routes from the ISFSI. This paper provides an overview of the MUA methodology and provides examples of its application to several ISFSIs with shutdown reactors.