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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.
Hiroaki Ogawa, Kiyoshi Kiuchi
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 152 | Number 2 | February 2006 | Pages 236-241
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE06-A2578
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Heavy rare gases like Xe have the highest abundance as fission products formed with dependence on the burnup of nuclear fuels. The interaction between heavy rare gases and low-energy electrons excited by the irradiation effect is very important for understanding the gas release mechanism and for developing the collecting method of radioactive fission product gases. Two types of plasma-testing apparatuses for the opened and closed low-energy plasmas were arranged using the radio frequency exciting source. The excitation behavior was evaluated by measuring the density and the temperature of the excited electrons. The electron density in the opened plasma increased with increase of the ionization energy of each rare gas. However, the electron density in the closed plasma of heavy rare gases (Ar, Kr, and Xe) was enhanced nearly a thousand times higher than that of light rare gases (Ne and He). The difference was interpreted as based on the cross section for energy transfer to the low-energy electron formed by the multisputtering effect on wall surfaces in the closed plasma.