NextEra advances toward Iowa nuclear plant restart

NextEra Energy CEO John Ketchum said on Friday that the company has been in contact with regional grid operators about a potential restart of the Duane Arnold Nuclear Power Plant located in Iowa.

Nuclear power in the United States has been on the decline for decades, but now is a sought-after electricity source by Big Tech's AI Data Centers. Nuclear power's ability, in the past year, to provide vast amounts of energy around-the clock that is almost carbon-free, has helped boost shares of nuclear plant companies.

Ketchum stated, "We are excited by the direction Duane Arnold has taken."

Three plants are currently attempting to restart a fully-shut U.S. reactor. Duane Arnold is one of them. Constellation Energy’s Three Mile Island, now known as Crane Clean Energy Center in Pennsylvania, secured a power-purchase agreement with Microsoft to supply power from its plant.

Ketchum stated that the Duane Arnold Energy Center (600 megawatts) which will shut down in 2020 after 45 years of operation, would also likely feed power to data centres, although no contracts have yet been signed.

A preliminary engineering assessment found that the reactor of the plant is in good shape, and that the entire plant could resume operations as soon as 2028.

Ketchum stated that the cooling towers of Duane Arnold, which were damaged by a strong windstorm, would need to be rebuilt. He added that he expected construction to be simple and did not expect nuclear expertise to be required.

He said that there is still work to do on the transmission and no equipment has been ordered for the site.

He said that two near-term milestones for resuming Duane are a detailed inventory and analysis of the site and finding a customer who will buy electricity from the site.

(source: Reuters)