Duane Arnold: IUC approves our Petition to Intervene against restart

On January 26, 2026, the Iowa Utilities Commission (IUC) approved Beyond Nuclear’s December 31, 2025 Petition to Intervene. See the IUC’s ruling here.

Beyond Nuclear is intervening, on behalf of its members and supporters in Iowa, due to the safety and environmental risks associated with NextEra’s scheme to restart the closed Duane Arnold atomic reactor (pictured above).

In August 2020, a direct hit by a derecho (straight line, tornado strength winds) caused extensive damage to Duane Arnold’s connection to grid electricity, its primary source of power to operate vital safety and cooling systems. The post-Fukushima “FLEX” facility was also damaged, ironically enough.

NextEra initially attempted to downplay and cover up the safety significance of the damage resulting from the extreme weather, focusing on damage to the non-safety significant mechanical draft cooling towers. NextEra stated it was closing Duane Arnold for good a couple months earlier than planned, due to the mechanical draft cooling tower damage.

However, some months later, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission admitted there was around a 1% (1/100) risk of a reactor core meltdown at Duane Arnold due to that incident. Such risks are supposed to be kept at levels of one-in-one-million (1/1,000,000), or at worst one-in-ten-thousand (1/10,000). 1/100 is 100 to 10,000 times too close a call with a reactor core meltdown catastrophe!

Duane Arnold is a half-century old reactor with the same design as the reactors that melted down at Fukushima Daiichi in Japan in March 2011. It is a General Electric Mark I boiling water reactor (BWR).

Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based attorney Wally Taylor, and Toledo, Ohio-based attorney Terry Lodge, serve as Beyond Nuclear’s legal co-counsel.

Taylor and Lodge also serve as co-counsel for an environmental coalition (Beyond Nuclear, Don’t Waste Michigan, Michigan Safe Energy Future, Nuclear Energy Information Service of Chicago, and Three Mile Island Alert of Pennsylvania) opposing Holtec International’s unprecedented restart of the Palisades “zombie” reactor in Michigan. (Although restarting closed reactors in the U.S. is unprecedented, as the most recent World Nuclear Industry Status Report documented, a closed reactor in Armenia was restarted in 1989. The U.S. following such a Soviet era nuclear power precedent is most unwise, in light of the 1986 Chornobyl nuclear catastrophe, the worst in history.)

Taylor and Lodge also served as co-counsel for a national grassroots environmental coalition opposed to highly radioactive waste consolidated interim storage facilities targeted at the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico.

Taylor and Lodge are also both recipients of Beyond Nuclear’s Dr. Judith H. Johsrud Unsung Hero Award:

Duane Arnold and Three Mile Island Unit 1 in Pennsylvania are the first closed reactors to follow Palisades’ restart precedent. Three Mile Island Alert, based in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is leading the resistance against Constellation’s TMI-1 restart scheme.

See other recent Beyond Nuclear website posts about our resistance to the closed reactor restart scheme by NextEra at Duane Arnold in Iowa: