IUC intervention against Duane Arnold restart

Beyond Nuclear is striving to intervene at the Iowa Utilities Commission (IUC), against NextEra’s scheme to restart the closed Duane Arnold atomic reactor (pictured above). Duane Arnold is a more than 50-year old General Electric Mark 1 reactor — that is, a twin-design to Fukushima Daiichi.

Our legal counsel is Wally Taylor of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He submitted a REPLY and AFFIDAVIT, countering NextEra’s false claim that Beyond Nuclear has no legal standing to intervene at the IUC.

NextEra is following the closed reactor restart precedent being set by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and Holtec International at the Palisades atomic reactor in Michigan. Beyond Nuclear is co-leading an environmental coalition against the Palisades restart as well. Taylor, as well as Terry Lodge of Toledo, Ohio, serve as the coalition’s co-counsel in the Palisades case.

Constellation is also following the Palisades precedent, attempting to restart the Three Mile Island Unit 1 reactor in Pennsylvania. Beyond Nuclear stands in solidarity with Three Mile island Alert, which has intervened at the NRC in opposition to that “zombie reactor” restart, as well.

Palisades, Duane Arnold, and TMI-1 are each infamous.

Palisades was a lemon from the get-go, had more than 50 years of problem-plagued operations, and now risks a Chornobyl-scale catastrophe on the Great Lakes shore if restarted.

Duane Arnold had a close call with catastrophe in August 2020, when directly struck by a derecho (straight line, tornado force winds). According to NRC itself, there was around a 1% risk of a meltdown due to the damage inflicted to the electrical systems needed to operate cooling and safety systems, post-Fukushima FLEX facilities, etc. NRC is supposed to keep reactor core meltdown risks to 1 in a million, or at least to 1 in 10,000. A 1 in 100 risk of meltdown is a hundred to 10,000 times too high! A 1 in 100 risk is closer to “radioactive Russian roulette” risk levels (a 1 in 6 risk of catastrophe).

And Three Mile Island is the scene of the worst reactor disaster in U.S. history, the 50% meltdown of the Unit 2 reactor core.

It is shocking and outrageous that industry would choose these three infamous reactors for zombification, and that NRC would be complicit and collude with such schemes.

For more information about resistance to the risky Duane Arnold restart, and the reasons why, see this Sierra Club Iowa Chapter’s October 1, 2025 web post.

Also see the following documents, provided by David Lochbaum, retired nuclear power safety director at Union of Concerned Scientists:

Events at Duane Arnold, 1968 to 2020 (compiled by Lochbaum);