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Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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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.
Chicago Local Section Event
March 28, 2024|7:00–8:00PM (8:00–9:00PM EDT)
Available to All Users
The ANS Chicago Section invites you to a presentation from Amanda Bachmann of Argonne National Laboratory about the impacts of deploying reactors fueled by High-Assay Low Enriched Uranium (HALEU).
The US is looking to deploy new reactor designs that will require HALEU fuel, which is needed by the current fleet of commercial reactors. Amanda's work models the deployment of select advanced reactors and the fuel cycle impacts of those deployments, as well as how decisions about those deployments affect the fuel cycle impacts. In addition, this work introduces a new method of dynamically modeling fuel depletion during a fuel cycle simulation.
Amanda is a postdoctoral researcher in the Reactor and Fuel Cycle Analysis Group at Argonne National Laboratory. Her work focuses on modeling, simulation, and software development for nuclear fuel cycle analysis. Previous work also includes modeling and simulation for nonproliferation safeguards applications. She holds a PhD in Nuclear, Plasma, Radiological Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2023), an MS (2020) and BS (2019) in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In her free time, she enjoys crocheting, gymnastics, and playing with her rabbit, Little R.
