For most of this century, the story of American nuclear power has been one of subtraction. Reactors get switched off, defueled, and handed to a company whose entire job is to spend the next couple of decades quietly taking the place apart and hauling it off for scrap. Palisades, an 800-megawatt plant on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, was supposed to be one of those stories. It shut down in May 2022, its previous owner sold it for decommissioning, and that should have been the end of it.<\/p>\n
Instead, owner Holtec International is trying to run the film backward. The plant has a fresh load of fuel sitting on site, a $1.52 billion federal loan behind it, and a stated goal of becoming the first retired nuclear reactor in U.S. history to be pulled out of decommissioning and switched back on. The one thing it doesn’t have yet is a firm restart date. After aiming first for last October, then the end of 2025, then late February, Holtec will now only say it plans to restart sometime in 2026, once the plant is ready.<\/p>\n
Palisades entered commercial service in 1971 and ran for more than five decades on the shoreline in Covert Township, Michigan. Its previous operator, Entergy, shut it down on May 20, 2022, certified the fuel out of the reactor a few weeks later, and transferred the license to Holtec for decommissioning. That is the normal endgame for an aging reactor. The operator stops generating, and a specialist firm spends 20 to 60 years dismantling it down to a grassy field.<\/p>\n
Holtec, which built much of its business on decommissioning, decided to do the opposite. In late 2023 it began the licensing slog to bring Palisades back, and in late August 2025 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission did something it had never done before. It cleared a plant that was already on the decommissioning track to return to “operations” status.<\/p>\n
According to the NRC’s docket for the plant<\/a>, that authorization is what let Holtec start moving real fuel back onto the site. The reactor had originally been licensed to run until 2031, and Holtec has signaled it intends to apply for a renewal that would stretch operations out to 2051. No U.S. commercial reactor had ever made that round trip from decommissioning back to operating. If Palisades pulls it off, it is the first.<\/p>\n The gap between “operations status on paper” and a reactor actually making power is a long punch list of hardware that has been sitting cold since 2022. The biggest headache has been the steam generators. A 2024 inspection found thousands of cracked tubes inside them, and rather than swap the generators out wholesale, which would have been a far bigger and more expensive job, Holtec went with a repair plan that sleeves the damaged tubes to reinforce them. Critics of the restart have argued the generators should be replaced outright instead of patched. Holtec has stuck with the sleeving approach.<\/p>\n In late March, the company cleared one of the larger technical gates by completing “passivation” of the primary system, bringing the reactor’s main cooling loop up to normal operating temperature and pressure for the first time since the shutdown. “The completion of primary system passivation reflects the diligence and technical rigor our team is bringing to position the plant for safe, reliable operation for decades,” Holtec International President Kelly Trice said in the announcement.<\/p>\n Even so, the fuel assemblies that arrived last fall are still sitting in secure storage in the spent fuel pool building, not in the reactor core. Before the NRC will sign off on loading them and letting the plant climb back up to power, Holtec still has to close out a generic safety issue known as GSI-191, which deals with whether the emergency cooling system could clog under certain accident conditions, plus finish switchyard restoration, fuel-handling upgrades, and a stack of required inspections.<\/p>\n As recently as this spring, Holtec’s own spokesperson would only describe the restart as “on the near horizon,” and as Nuclear Newswire reported<\/a>, the company has declined to commit to a calendar date, saying only that it will restart when the plant is ready for long-term operations.<\/p>\n Money is the reason any of this is moving at the pace it is. In September 2024 the Department of Energy closed a $1.52 billion loan guarantee to help finance the restart, and has been releasing it in stages, with six disbursements approved so far. The federal interest is straightforward. Palisades feeds the Midcontinent grid run by MISO, and that region is retiring coal plants faster than it is replacing the around-the-clock power they supplied. A reactor that runs flat out roughly nine days in ten is exactly the kind of “firm” generation utilities are scrambling for as electricity demand climbs, a lot of it driven by the data centers behind the current AI build-out.<\/p>\n By the DOE’s own math, laid out on its project page for the loan<\/a>, restarting the plant avoids about 4.47 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, which the agency pegs at roughly the same as taking more than 970,000 gasoline cars off the road. There is a human side to the numbers too.<\/p>\n The project is expected to keep or create around 600 jobs at the site, many held by workers who have been there more than 20 years, with close to half the restart workforce unionized. The plant also sits in a community where residents pay higher energy costs than 97 percent of the country, which is part of why the restart has local support to go with the local opposition.<\/p>\n Nuclear is suddenly fashionable again in forms that would have sounded far-fetched a few years ago. The Navy is preparing to run a naval base off a docked aircraft carrier’s reactors<\/a>, and TerraPower, the company Bill Gates co-founded, just broke ground on a sodium-cooled reactor in Wyoming<\/a>, the first genuinely new American reactor design to start construction in nearly a decade. Palisades is the same impulse pointed in the other direction. Instead of building something new, resurrect something that already exists.<\/p>\n The restart is only half of what Holtec wants to do with the site. The company plans to build two of its own SMR-300 small modular reactors next to the existing plant, named Pioneer-1 and Pioneer-2, in partnership with Hyundai Engineering & Construction and Mitsubishi Electric, with $400 million in DOE backing. Each unit is designed for about 300 megawatts, so the pair would add roughly 600 megawatts and push the whole site toward 1,400 megawatts, close to double what the original reactor puts out on its own.<\/p>\n On New Year’s Eve, Holtec filed the first half of its construction permit application with the NRC, asking for limited permission to begin preliminary site work such as soil compaction and foundation work, and the commission opened its environmental review of the new-build plan in June. Holtec has asked for approval by the end of 2026 and is aiming for the early 2030s to bring the reactors online.<\/p>\nThe steam generators are why the date keeps slipping<\/h2>\n
A $1.52 billion bet on baseload<\/h2>\n
Two small reactors are supposed to follow<\/h2>\n