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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.
Margit Fábián, Csaba Aracki (Centre for Energy Research)
Proceedings | 16th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM 2017) | Charlotte, NC, April 9-13, 2017 | Pages 840-847
The incorporation of actinide and actinide surrogates in borosilicate matrix was studied with uranium, cerium and neodymium. This study was carried out on matrix glasses doped respectively by 10 and 30wt% UO? while CeO?, Nd?O? was used to chemically model the actinides in the matrix. The structure was studied by Neutron diffraction combined with Reverse Monte Carlo simulations. For all studied glasses, it was found that the basic network structure consists of tetrahedral SiO? units and trigonal BO? and tetrahedral BO? units, forming mixed [?]Si-O-[3], [4]B bond-linkages. The BO?/BO? ratio was also proved by NMR spectroscopy. From the first nearest neighbour distances of U-O, Ce-O, Nd-O atomic pairs and from the second nearest neighbor atomic pair correlations we found that uranium, cerium, neodymium ions are located in the borosilicate network.
