John Ketchum, chairman, president and CEO of Nextera Power, speaks throughout S&P International’s 2023 CERAWeek convention in Houston, Texas, US, on Wednesday, March 8, 2023.
F. Carter Smith | Bloomberg | Getty Photos
NextEra Energy is seeing sturdy curiosity from information heart prospects in restarting the Duane Arnold nuclear plant in Iowa, CEO John Ketchum mentioned Wednesday.
“We’re very busy Dwayne Arnold,” Ketchum informed traders on the corporate’s third-quarter earnings name. “We’re very interested by restarting the plant.”
NextEra is conducting engineering assessments of the plant and is working with the Nuclear Regulatory Fee and native stakeholders to guage a attainable restart, the manager mentioned.
“Clearly, it is understood that there is very sturdy curiosity from prospects, actually information heart prospects, round this web site particularly,” Ketchum mentioned.
Dwayne Arnold’s boiling water reactor has a less complicated design that needs to be simpler to recommission at an “engaging value,” Ketchum mentioned. NextEra views the plant as a long-term asset and hopes to strike a sexy energy buy settlement, he mentioned.
Ketchum warned in July that NextEra would solely restart the plant if the challenge was “essentially risk free.”
The Duane Arnold Power Heart northwest of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, ceased operations in 2020 after greater than 40 years of service. The U.S. nuclear trade has confronted a wave of reactor shutdowns over the previous decade because it struggled to compete with low cost pure fuel.
However energy corporations proceed to restart just lately closed nuclear vegetation as demand for electrical energy rises from information facilities, manufacturing and the electrification of the economic system.
Ketchum’s feedback about Duane Arnold come a month later Constellation energy revealed plans to reboot the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania in 2028 via an settlement with Microsoft.
Tech giants like Microsoft are grappling with big vitality calls for as they scale up synthetic intelligence. Nuclear energy is attracting growing curiosity from know-how corporations as a result of reactors present giant quantities of dependable, carbon-free vitality. Within the alphabet Google and Amazon just lately introduced investments in next-generation small nuclear reactors.
Holtec Worldwide, a non-public nuclear know-how firm, has paved the best way for restarting reactors with Palisades plant in Michigan. Holtec expects this plant to be again up and working by the top of 2025. Will probably be the primary nuclear plant in US historical past to restart after a shutdown.
