The company decommissioning the Duane Arnold Duane Arnold Energy Center plans to start moving spent fuel from the shuttered plant’s reactor to dry storage this year, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspector said this week.
NextEra should have the fuel on the move “starting in 2021,” Rex Edwards, an inspector working out of NRC’s Region III office in Illinois, said during a public teleconference about Duane Arnold’s Post Shutdown Decommissioning Activities Report (PSDAR) Wednesday evening.
An additional storage pad has been constructed near Duane Arnold’s existing spent fuel storage installation to house the plant’s inventory, Edwards said.
In a Friday email to RadWaste Monitor a spokesperson for NextEra declined to provide any timeline for spent fuel transfers this year.
The head of NRC’s reactor decommissioning segment, Bruce Watson, said that NextEra plans to move all spent fuel to dry storage and place the plant in safe storage (SAFSTOR) mode by 2023. Complete decommissioning should take place by 2080 or so, Watson said.
A Duane Arnold decommissioning fact sheet published by NextEra lists the same dates for spent fuel storage and project completion.
Wednesday’s virtual meeting was the second of two PSDAR comment sessions held by NRC — the first was an in-person event held in Palo, Iowa, Duane Arnold’s host location. The phones were quiet during Wednesday’s meeting, which began at 6 p.m. Eastern time and only ran for under an hour of its two-hour time slot. Members of the public didn’t offer any input during the virtual meeting.
Duane Arnold ceased operations two months ahead of schedule in August 2020 after a hurricane damaged its two cooling towers. Iowa’s only nuclear power plant first started up in 1974.
