A licensing bundle that would pave the way for the restart of the Duane Arnold Energy Center near Palo could be issued as soon as January 2028, officials from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) revealed during a public outreach meeting Tuesday night, April 14 at the Cedar Rapids Public Library.
Officials said Tuesday that the NRC has established a three-member restart panel – a senior-level oversight body drawing experts from licensing, inspection, physical and cybersecurity, emergency preparedness, environmental review, and legal staff.
The panel meets regularly to coordinate the agency’s work and identify challenges, and Tuesday night’s meeting, while not an official hearing, was intended to share updates on the recommissioning evaluation process. NRC officials said they are focused on determining whether the plant can be restarted safely and securely.
The 615-megawatt Duane Arnold Energy Center – Iowa’s only nuclear plant, which opened in 1974 – ceased operations following the August 2020 derecho that brought winds of up to 140 mph to the Corridor, causing heavy damage to the plant’s cooling towers.
The plant was already scheduled to be decommissioned in October 2020 after its main customer, Alliant Energy, paid $110 million in 2018 to exit its power purchase agreement with the plant several years early.
However, in October 2025, NextEra Energy, the plant’s majority owner, officially announced its plans to restart the plant. And those plans were propelled in November, when NextEra announced a new power purchase agreement with Google, under which the tech company would purchase the majority of the power produced from a restarted Duane Arnold for its new data center, now under construction in southwest Cedar Rapids.
Importantly, however, that agreement does not mean the plant is guaranteed to restart, as several regulatory hurdles remain with both state and federal regulators.
Even after being shut down, the Duane Arnold plant still has a valid operating license, currently set to expire in February 2034. However, returning the plant to operational status requires a licensing bundle – a set of actions that must be issued together. That bundle consists of an exemption to rescind the decommissioning certifications, plus license amendments to restore an emergency plan, security plan, and technical specification conditions to operational status.
NextEra has submitted the recommissioning applications, and the NRC has accepted them for review and begun its safety evaluation.
About 25 in-person attendees were on hand for the meeting, along with several people who attended virtually. A one-hour open house was held prior to the formal meeting, allowing attendees to interact directly with NRC staffers.
Billy Dickson, the NRC’s Region III branch chief in the Division of Operating Reactor Safety, said that while the decision to pursue a potential Duane Arnold restart lies with NextEra, “the NRC plays a central and authoritative role in ensuring that that any such effort is conducted safely, transparently and with in full compliance with NRC regulatory requirements protecting public health, safety and the environment.”
NRC officials said a Federal Register notice regarding the licensing bundle is expected to be published around April 22. After publication, there will be a 30-day public comment period and a 60-day window to request a hearing.
If the NRC staff reaches a conclusion regarding whether the plant can be restarted safely, it would issue the licensing bundle on or before Jan. 29, 2028. That issuance would transition the plant from decommissioning to operational status, but it would not mean the plant would immediately begin generating power, as several additional steps would be required, including refueling.
NextEra officials have said they hope to bring the plant back online by early 2029, and have touted the addition of several hundred jobs, both during pre-restart construction activities and for the operation of the plant itself.
NextEra has also submitted an environmental report outlining the potential impacts of the Duane Arnold restart. The NRC is conducting its own environmental review and plans to publish a draft environmental assessment this summer for public comment. A final environmental assessment is expected by the end of 2026.
The review is examining the plant’s thermal effects, surface and groundwater withdrawal, discharge impacts, and associated state permits.
If the review instead determines significant environmental impacts are possible, the agency would prepare a full environmental impact statement.
Several on-site inspections have already been conducted at the Duane Arnold facility, NRC officials said, and two inspection reports have already been released, covering reactor vessel integrity and radiation protection. The inspections examine pumps, valves, piping, structural integrity, the reactor vessel, radiation protection, environmental monitoring, security, and emergency preparedness. The impacts of the 2020 derecho that affected the plant is also being evaluated, and NextEra has proposed plant modifications in response to that event.
The meeting also provided an opportunity for attendees to provide comments and ask questions about the recommissioning process.
Retired Duane Arnold employee Frank Van Etten shared his 37 years of experience at the plant and spoke to the pride and community identity the facility represented for workers and their families. He showed a copy of his operating license and a plaque presented to employees after a planned outage, which included the adage “teamwork is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.”
Hiawatha Mayor Steve Dodson, Palo city council member Darren Stoltenberg and Linn County supervisor Sami Scheetz also said they support the plant’s restart.
“I have friends that used to work there before they decommission it in 2020, (and) I know a couple of my friends have already been rehired back into the training center,” Mr. Dodson said, stressing the plant’s expected job creation numbers, as well as its overall economic benefit for the region.
Rita Seringer, a nuclear policy fellow at the national nonprofit Generation Atomic, also expressed support for the restart as an essential contributor to meeting future energy demand.
A handful of attendees spoke in opposition to the restart as well.
Patrick Vosold of Fairfield argued that nuclear power is obsolete, costly, and produces waste with half-lives of thousands of years – waste for which no permanent disposal solution exists. He said Iowa’s energy needs could be met with solar and wind power installations on about 2% of the state’s land area. “I think at this point, this agency has become a facilitator for this sort of thing, rather than actually saying, we’re just going to take a hard note skeptical look at this every step of the way,” he said.
And Wally Taylor of Marion, legal chair of the Sierra Club’s Iowa chapter, raised procedural objections to the restart, arguing there is no explicit provision in the Atomic Energy Act or NRC regulations authorizing restart of a decommissioned reactor, and that the NRC is assembling “a workaround” from existing rules rather than conducting formal rulemaking procedures.
Representatives from the offices of U.S. Reps. Ashley Hinson and Mariannette Miller-Meeks and U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst also attended the meeting.
The NRC’s dedicated website tracking the Duane Arnold recommissioning process is at www.nrc.gov/info-finder/reactors/duan.
Questions and comments about the process can be submitted via email at [email protected]
