Wally Taylor is the Legal Chair of the Sierra Club Iowa chapter.

Recent news articles have reported on NexEra’s interest in restarting the Duane Arnold nuclear plant. We need to consider the consequences of such an action.

Restarting a closed reactor in decommissioning status has never been attempted. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) admits there are no regulations authorizing the restart of a closed reactor. In order to restart Duane Arnold, NextEra will have to cobble together a daisy chain of existing regulations that is of doubtful legality, as is being attempted at the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan. Nor is there any assurance that the operation could be done safely.

The Duane Arnold plant has been in the decommissioning process for about four years. So it is not just a matter of putting fuel back in the reactor and starting it up. Even the Palisades reactor will require an expensive and tricky process to attempt to restart. And no decommissioning activity had been done there.

Speaking to Bloomberg News in June, NextEra CEO John Ketchum said the company would “consider” restarting Duane Arnold if it “could be done safely and on budget.” During an earnings call with investors in July, Ketchum said NextEra might consider restarting Duane Arnold if it could be done “in a way that is essentially risk free with plenty of mitigants around the approach.”

So how does the project become “risk free”? Assuming he means financially risk free, that could occur by obtaining billions of dollars from the government, funded by the taxpayers. That is how the restart of the Palisades plant is being financed.

On the earnings call, Ketchum said that a restarted Duane Arnold plant would be used to provide power to data centers. Do we really want to use billions of dollars of taxpayer money so NextEra can provide power to a private industry? That is just like the federal tax credits funding the carbon dioxide pipelines for the benefit of a private company. If not for the billions in taxpayer dollars, would NextEra even consider restarting Duane Arnold?

Aside from the cost to taxpayers and the risky regulatory process for relicensing the plant, there are serious negative aspects to nuclear power. Contrary to the nuclear industry’s assertions, nuclear power is neither clean nor renewable. Nuclear reactor fuel is made from uranium, which is mined from the ground, just like oil, gas or coal. No one refers to those energy sources as renewable.

The uranium that is mined leaves tailings and uranium processing leaves behind radioactive waste and harmful chemicals.

During the operation of the nuclear plant, a radioactive material, tritium, often leaks and pollutes groundwater.

But the really dirty aspect of nuclear power is the radioactive waste, primarily spent nuclear fuel. There is approximately 90,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel in the United States today. And more is being added each day.

Restarting Duane Arnold would add even more. And no one knows what to do with it. Efforts to establish a permanent repository have failed. The NRC has licensed two “interim” storage facilities in New Mexico and Texas. But neither New Mexico nor Texas want it. That dispute is now before the United States Supreme Court. One federal court said the spent fuel will remain dangerous for “time spans seemingly beyond human comprehension.”

With no foreseeable likelihood of having a permanent repository, these “interim” facilities will become de facto permanent repositories without the protections of a permanent repository.

However, there is an alternative, one Ketchum even acknowledged in an October earnings call. In that call he repeatedly touted NextEra’s significant build out of renewable energy and battery storage, saying, “We are making smart capital investments in low-cost solar generation and battery storage, which are continuing to reduce our overall fuel cost and when combined with generation modernizations, have saved customers nearly $16 billion since 2001.” He also said, “We believe new wind is up to 60% cheaper and new solar up to 40% cheaper than new gas power generation.”

As for nuclear power, Ketchum told investors,

There are only a few nuclear plants that can be recommissioned in an economic way. We are currently evaluating the recommissioning of our Duane Arnold nuclear plant in Iowa as one example. But even with a 100% success rate on those recommissionings, we would still only meet less than 1% of that demand. Existing merchant nuclear generation is also limited in its ability to meet that demand, given there are only approximately 20 merchant nuclear plants in this country.

The Duane Arnold plant was closed because it was uneconomical in light of growing renewable energy generation. Nothing has changed.

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Top photo of the Duane Arnold Energy Center is by AsNuke, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license and available via Wikimedia Commons.