The U.S. Department of Energy will loan NextEra Energy up to $1.9 billion to restart the Duane Arnold nuclear plant near Cedar Rapids.
Deputy Secretary of Energy James Danly visited rural Linn County to announce the loan, which is the final piece of financing the energy center needs. He called the recommissioning an early example of an American "nuclear renaissance.”
“This is part of the larger strategy that the administration has following President Trump's executive orders to quadruple the total amount of nuclear power in the United States by 2050,” Danly said. “We're preserving every nuclear power plant we can. We are uprating every power plant that can be, so that we can get more electricity out of the ones we already have. We're — like this case — un-mothballing nuclear power plants that have been shuttered and whose power we need very much right now.”
The Duane Arnold Energy Center closed in August 2020. Engineering director Paul Hansen said the center planned to shutter when Alliant Energy chose not to renew its contract. Then, unexpected storm damage from the derecho sped those plans along.
When the facility closed, it retained a few dozen employees. Hundreds lost their jobs and most left the area.
“Most importantly, the value of Duane Arnold is for Iowa and the people of Linn County,” Danly said. “We're going to see an economic benefit of about $9 billion. That's $40 million to local schools, $70 [million] plus to taxes, 450 permanent jobs here.”
Google has already contracted to purchase most of the power produced at Duane Arnold. It’s planning a data center nearby, drawing outcry from Palo residents and straining good will between the city of Palo and Linn County. Google has not publicly disclosed how much money it has invested into recommissioning Duane Arnold.
Critics worry that a power-hungry data center will drive up energy costs for nearby residents or will be given priority in the case of blackouts or surging demand.
Danly said more energy is a good thing for all grid users.
“Whenever you bring more electricity to the bulk power system, rates will go down, all things being equal,” he said. “So even if you have a power purchase agreement, the fact of the matter is, you want — for low rates — to have as much generation and as much load to serve simultaneously, because the more consumers there are of electricity, the more people across whom the fixed costs of the bulk power system are shared.”
NextEra spokesperson Bill Orlove also said the Central Iowa Power Cooperative will purchase about 50 megawatts of power annually to help power roughly 300,000 area homes.
Inside the nuclear facility
Duane Arnold started operating in 1974. Stepping inside its control room is like stepping onto a Cold War movie set.
“As you can imagine, we’re doing quite a bit of upgrades for the restart effort,” Hansen said.
As head engineer, he’s touring government officials, media and NextEra newbies through the decades-old facility. The control room is wall-to-wall beige metal with small black squares, spinning dials and blinking red lights. Hundreds of small black levers sit underneath.
“This area here is what controls our turbine, which makes the money,” Hansen said, motioning to what looks like an abstract line drawing on the wall. “That’s all ’60s technology.”
Then, Hansen moves to the reactor room. Everyone walks on the yellow sticky mats, which demarcate areas where testing has proved there’s definitely not any radioactive contamination.
The reactor itself sits inactive and underwater. Lighting underneath makes the deep pool look blue.
Ray Wheaton, director of restart operations, said that producing electricity is, at its core, producing steam.
“The difference between a coal plant or a natural gas plant, steam plant and a nuclear plant is really how the steam is made, and the steam is made with safe nuclear energy,” he said.
Nuclear energy is typically created by nuclear fission — that is, splitting a uranium-235 atom to release heat.
“Basically, steam is produced out of the reactor,” Wheaton said, adding that the steam turns a turbine and then a generator, which produces electricity.
One of the major concerns with nuclear power is what to do with the radioactive waste that nuclear reactions create.
Danly said his agency is working on long-term storage plans, but is also hoping to reuse spent fuel more effectively.
“It still retains 98% of the energy density it had before,” Danly said. “Reprocessing and the like can actually get way more blood out of the stone than we have historically … The objective is not just to ensure that it's safely stored, which is obviously the primary concern, but also that we get as much out of it as we can, so we start looking at the ‘spent fuel’ as an asset on the ledger, not a liability.”
NextEra says it plans to finish the regulatory process and renovations to Duane Arnold in time to restart the plant in 2029.
