A 615-megawatt Iowa reactor sat dark for five years after a storm destroyed its cooling towers, and the $1.9 million annual deal Linn County just locked in rewrites who actually holds the cards when nuclear power comes back to town
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A derecho hit Palo, Iowa on an August night in 2020 and rearranged the future. Two cooling towers at the Duane Arnold Energy Center collapsed under straight line winds exceeding 100 miles per hour, and Iowa’s only nuclear power plant shut down months ahead of schedule. The reactor had run for nearly half a century. Nobody expected it to run again.
Then Google needed power.
A machine that was already dying when the wind arrived
The 615-megawatt plant first entered service in 1975 and operated continuously in rural Linn County near Palo until its 2020 decommissioning. The derecho accelerated what had already been a negotiated end, but the infrastructure underneath the fallen towers was largely intact. A boiling water reactor does not simply vanish because its cooling loops are gone.
The phrase “level of partnership” signals that the county sees itself as a partner in this project, not a bystander waiting for property taxes to arrive.
The concrete, the fuel channels, the containment dome all remained, sitting on nearly 400 acres of corn country flatland northwest of Cedar Rapids. For four years the site existed in a kind of bureaucratic limbo, neither fully decommissioned nor officially alive. Then, in October 2025, everything shifted.
Why Google changed the math on a dead plant
NextEra announced an agreement to supply Google with the majority of the power generated at the plant over 25 years. The arrangement gave the restart project something no utility application alone could provide: a guaranteed buyer before a single cooling tower was rebuilt.
Iowa’s data center boom had been building quietly for years, and Google’s footprint near Cedar Rapids needed more power than the regional grid could promise. NextEra plans to rebuild the cooling towers and other demolished sections of the plant, including the site training center. The economics looked compelling on paper. But the people living closest to the plant had not yet said yes to anything.
What a small Iowa county did next surprised the nuclear industry
Linn County supervisors had been watching this momentum build for months. They could have simply approved rezoning and stepped aside. Instead, they drafted something new.
The board unanimously approved the third and final reading of a rezoning request from NextEra Energy, transitioning nearly 400 acres around the plant to a new exclusive use district specific to nuclear power generation. That vote was the visible part. The Linn County Board of Supervisors then approved a Host Community Agreement on January 7, 2026, ensuring that any financially related impacts to the county fall on the nuclear energy company, not taxpayers. No county in the United States had written that kind of protection directly into its zoning code before.
The real stakes: who pays when a reactor comes back to life
The first payment will be $1.9 million, due within 30 days after the facility begins selling electricity to the grid. After that, annual payments continue for the length of the agreement, each increasing by 5 percent to keep pace with inflation and long term service needs.
Supervisor Brandy Z. Meisheid put the county’s position plainly. “Signing the host community agreement reflects Linn County’s commitment to putting residents and public safety first, while ensuring taxpayer dollars are not used to subsidize private business,” Meisheid said. The phrase “level of partnership” signals that the county sees itself as a partner in this project, not a bystander waiting for property taxes to arrive.
NextEra project developer Garrett Goldfinger has said restarting the plant would add $16 billion to the U.S. economy over its 25-year operating period, with $8 billion staying in Linn County alone. Many locals and union leaders have cited 880 temporary construction jobs and 433 permanent positions as reasons for their support.
A template for every town that comes next
Cedar Rapids Mayor Tiffany O’Donnell captured the civic mood at an Iowa Utilities Commission meeting late last year. “This project reflects a major investment in Iowa’s clean energy future and a transformational economic opportunity for the greater Cedar Rapids region,” O’Donnell said. That alignment, city mayor, county supervisors and a major utility all pointed the same direction, is rare in nuclear siting.
The path ahead is still long. NextEra hopes to have the plant open in late 2028, but the project still needs approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources and multiple other agencies. The community agreement does not guarantee the project succeeds; it guarantees that if it does, Palo and its neighbors are not simply along for the ride.
What Linn County built is being studied by planners in Illinois and beyond, where communities are weighing their own nuclear hosting decisions. For states racing to pass nuclear procurement laws, that model is a practical instruction manual. One Iowa county decided that hosting a reactor is not charity toward an energy company. It is a negotiation, and now there is a signed document that says so.
Hugo is an engineer with strong technical expertise. Multilingual from an early age, his writing combines technical clarity with a strong interest in science and energy.
