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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.
Robert G. Mills
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 9 | Number 3 | May 1986 | Pages 408-421
Technical Paper | Fusion Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24729
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A reactor is proposed in which the principal role of the magnetic field is to reduce the thermal conductivity. A purely toroidal magnetic field confines a plasma whose pressure is almost constant. The plasma is limited in height by two planar electrodes. The density rises as the temperature falls toward the material boundaries to maintain essentially isobaric conditions. Fueling the reactor is a simple by-product of the drift motion of the ions through the reactor, the confinement time being determined by the residence time of transport rather than by diffusion. As in many reactor schemes, the size is large, but not unreasonable. There are unsolved problems requiring research, but these seem addressable with modest temperature plasmas.