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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.
G. D. Del Cul, William D. Bostick
Nuclear Technology | Volume 109 | Number 1 | January 1995 | Pages 161-162
Technical Note | Material | doi.org/10.13182/NT95-A35076
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Packed-column experiments with iron dust of 40 to 60 mesh (Fisher 1–57) showed an excellent uptake of pertechnetate ions from alkaline (pH ∼ 8.5) high-nitrate (100 to 250 g/ℓ) solutions at flow rates measured in bed volumes (BVs) of between 0.05 and 0.15 BV/min. The columns worked well until they became plugged by rusting after several hundred bed volumes of solution were flowed through (330 to 900 BV). Similar tests using organic ion-exchange resins, such as Dowex SRB-OH and Reillex HP and Reillex HPQ, and the same alkaline high-nitrate solutions showed breakthroughs after 20 to 50 BV were passed.