By Jared Strong, The Gazette
Shuttered nuclear power plants have never been restarted in the United States, but the Duane Arnold Energy Center near Palo is poised to be among the few that try.
Its owner, NextEra Energy, hopes to finish its restoration of the facility that closed in 2020 in about three years, and resume operation in the final three months of 2028, according to documents it filed with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Two other companies are engaged in similar restart efforts — in Michigan and Pennsylvania — and one of them might be online later this year.
“NextEra is monitoring the progress made by (the other companies) and will make adjustments as appropriate, based on lessons learned from those precedential actions,” the company said in its regulatory filings.
The Duane Arnold site, if restarted, would have power output comparable with the smallest commercial nuclear power plant in the country — a single reactor facility in New York that has a maximum output capacity of 614 megawatts.
Duane Arnold’s is 615 megawatts. It is the only such facility in Iowa.
There are 54 commercial nuclear power plants in operation in the United States. The largest is in Georgia, with four reactors and a rated capacity of about 4,700 megawatts, or more than seven times the capacity of Duane Arnold.
Duane Arnold’s relatively low output — which makes the plant more expensive to operate per megawatt than others — combined with the accelerated adoption of wind power in Iowa, led NextEra to start decommissioning the facility in 2020. It ceased operation that August, after that year’s derecho damaged its cooling towers.
The company has since installed solar arrays at the site, which it will operate for Alliant Energy. The arrays can produce about a third of the total electrical output of the nuclear facility.
The interest in restarting Duane Arnold and other nuclear sites has been spurred by an uptick in the demand for electricity, driven by power-hungry data centers. Two are planned for Cedar Rapids.
The site has a capacity that is equivalent to about 2 percent of the total electrical generation in Iowa, according to state data.
OTHER SITES
The Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan is poised to be the first to restart after launching a decommissioning process.
It is several years older than Duane Arnold — having started operation in 1971 — but it has a higher output potential at about 800 megawatts.
It also started decommissioning later, in 2022. It was purchased by Holtec International, which started the recommissioning process less than a year later.
Holtec has indicated it would expand the site by adding two more reactors over the next decade. It cited strong support from Michigan state officials and the federal government for that decision.
The U.S. Department of Energy is backing a $1.5 billion loan to the company to restart the plant, and the state of Michigan gave it $300 million in the past two years.
It’s unclear what financial assistance Duane Arnold might receive in Iowa. A spokesperson for the company did not respond to a request to comment for this article.
Gov. Kim Reynolds said last month the potential for nuclear energy in Iowa “is amazing” and pledged to create a task force to support it. She noted that luring qualified employees — such as nuclear engineers — to Iowa is a potential challenge.
NextEra, in its correspondence with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said it “has developed a staffing plan that will gradually increase site and fleet staff to support initial inspections, facility renovations, and finally startup and operations.”
Duane Arnold employed more than 500 people when it was operational. NextEra said its annual payroll was about $85 million.
NextEra has said the facility is in good shape, aside from cooling towers that were damaged by the 2020 derecho. The commission has not yet published recent inspection information about the site.
An early inspection of the Palisades plant in Michigan identified “a large number” of heat transfer tubes that needed further analysis or repair. The fission power plants generate heat to turn water into steam, which drives turbines to create electricity.
The other nuclear power plant that might restart is in Pennsylvania. It began operation in 1974 — the same year as Duane Arnold — and began decommissioning in 2019.
The Three Mile Island Nuclear Station — now called the Crane Clean Energy Center — had a maximum output of 835 megawatts. Its owner started the recommissioning process in November 2024.
“Preliminary evaluations of key plant equipment have determined that the equipment is in good condition and can be restored without significant modifications,” its owner, Constellation Energy Corp., wrote to the commission.
There was a second reactor at the site that had a partial meltdown in 1979 and was not restarted.
The commission has created “restart panels” of experts to guide the recommissioning processes for each of the three power plants.
