A nuclear plant does nothing more routine than a refueling outage. Every 18 months or so the crew unbolts the head of the reactor vessel, floods the pit above it, swaps out roughly a third of the fuel underwater, closes everything back up, and nobody past the parking lot notices. Palisades, an 805-megawatt plant on the Lake Michigan shore in Covert Township, Michigan, has not done any of that since 2022, because the company that bought it was supposed to be cutting it up for scrap.<\/p>\n
On Sunday morning, August 30, a crew there started putting fuel back in.<\/p>\n
Holtec’s own notice, dated that same Sunday<\/a>, says loading began that morning. By Monday, according to a company photo caption relayed by WMUK and ABC57, eight of the 204 fuel assemblies that make up the core were sitting in the vessel. The other 196 were still in the pool.<\/p>\n Back in June, when we covered the first half of this story<\/a>, all of that fuel was parked in storage on site with a stack of repairs and regulatory sign-offs between it and the reactor. Now the fuel is where fuel goes. Nobody has switched anything on. The chain reaction itself, criticality in plant language, comes after weeks of testing, and the company will not put a date on it.<\/p>\n A Palisades fuel assembly is 12 feet (3.7 m) long and holds 216 rods, and each rod is stacked with about 200 uranium dioxide pellets, per a Holtec spokesperson talking to Fox 17 last October. Each pellet is the size of a pencil eraser. The same spokesperson put the energy in one pellet at roughly a ton of coal. So one assembly carries something like 43,000 pellets, and the full core of 204 is closer to 8.8 million of them.<\/p>\n The crew moves those bundles with a crane, entirely underwater. The vessel head comes off, the cavity above it is flooded with borated water, and the fuel travels from the spent fuel pool into containment through a transfer tube. A refueling machine, a bridge that rolls on rails over the cavity, drops a mast onto the top of an assembly, lifts it clear, drives it over the right slot in the core and lowers it in. Palisades got a brand-new fuel handling machine for this, which the company said in July had been installed and tested. The photo the company released shows exactly that: blue water, a mast going down, a round pit at the bottom.<\/p>\n That pit made news of its own last October. Michigan Public reported that a worker fell into the reactor cavity on October 21, 2025, was checked out and went back to work.<\/p>\n The fuel itself is a mix. Sixty-eight brand-new assemblies arrived in October 2025 and have been sitting in the spent fuel pool building since. The company says the rest of the core is partially burned fuel from the plant’s last operating cycles, so some of the assemblies going back in are the same ones that were in there when Entergy shut the reactor down on May 20, 2022. The vessel was empty by June 10 that year.<\/p>\n Fuel in the vessel puts the plant in what its Technical Specifications call Mode 6. Pressurized water reactors run on a ladder of six modes, and 6 is refueling. From here the crew has to close the vessel, heat the primary loop, walk the plant up through cold shutdown, hot shutdown and hot standby, and only in Mode 2 does anyone pull rods and go critical. Mode 1 is power operation. “Our team is now carefully loading the 204 fuel assemblies,” Holtec chief nuclear officer Fadi Diya said in a statement to ABC57, and that is the whole update on timing. Spokesperson Nick Culp told WMUK he would not say when loading finishes.<\/p>\n When the federal loan closed in September 2024, the owner said the plant would be back online in the fourth quarter of 2025. The two steam generators killed that schedule.<\/p>\n A steam generator is the wall between the reactor and the rest of the plant. Hot, slightly radioactive water from the core runs through thousands of thin metal tubes, and clean water on the outside of those tubes boils into the steam that spins the turbine. A cracked tube lets the two sides mix. An inspection in the summer of 2024 found stress-cracking indications in 1,163 of the roughly 16,000 tubes, according to a call summary the NRC made public that December, and Michigan Public reported on September 1 that thousands ended up needing repair. Opponents wanted both generators replaced. Holtec chose to slide Framatome Alloy 690 sleeves inside the damaged tubes instead of plugging them or swapping the units out, and in a meeting with NRC staff the company and Framatome said sleeves of this type had gone into other heat exchangers but never into a steam generator at a nuclear plant, according to the summary the NRC published in March 2025<\/a>.<\/p>\n Crews finished the sleeving in the summer of 2025. Chemical cleaning of the secondary side followed. After that the same crews replaced the control rod drive mechanism nozzles on the reactor head, ran a chemical decontamination and passivation of the primary loop that wrapped up in March 2026, took the main turbine apart and put it back on its turning gear, and installed the new fuel handling machine. In July the company called the last of those big jobs a watershed and said more than 5,000 smaller work items remained.<\/p>\n The company’s target dates slid with the work. Fourth quarter 2025 became “early 2026” in December. Early 2026 became the end of February. February became “when the plant is ready.” Founder and CEO Kris Singh told the Financial Times over the summer, in an interview relayed by ANS Nuclear Newswire, that he expected a restart this year. On September 1, WMUK reported<\/a> the company is now aiming for early next year, and Culp gave the station the one date that has teeth: the power purchase agreement with Wolverine Power Cooperative and Hoosier Energy, which take 100 percent of the plant’s output, carries a contractual deadline of March 2027.<\/p>\n The Department of Energy closed a loan guarantee of up to $1.52 billion for the restart on September 30, 2024, and has been paying it out in tranches tied to progress. The sixth disbursement<\/a>, $155.9 million on September 16, 2025, brought the total released to $491,056,853. A seventh has not been announced. Michigan put in $300 million of its own across two state budgets, $150 million each. Culp told WMUK the new fuel was fabricated in the United States by the supplier that has fed Palisades for decades and contains no Russian enriched uranium, though he would not name the enricher. Russia supplied nearly 26 percent of the enriched uranium loaded into US reactors in 2025, according to the Energy Information Administration report the station cited.<\/p>\n The buyers are two rural electric cooperatives. Wolverine is a Michigan generation-and-transmission co-op, Hoosier is its Indiana counterpart, and between them they have contracted every megawatt-hour of the 805 megawatts the plant is rated for, enough for about 800,000 homes by the owner’s count. Once it makes any.<\/p>\n Three environmental groups sued the NRC in November 2025 over the exemption that let a plant already in decommissioning go back to operations status. The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan dismissed the case in late June, ruling that challenges to NRC licensing orders belong in the federal courts of appeals, the Justice Department said on July 1<\/a>. Michigan Public reported this week that some nearby residents are still trying to stop the restart, arguing the plant was unreliable before it shut down.<\/p>\n The NRC never went away. Its inspectors stay with the plant through every step up the mode ladder, and Culp told WOOD TV in December that the crew runs tests and surveillances at each of those steps before moving to the next. The operating license runs to March 24, 2031, and the company has told the NRC it intends to apply for a 20-year renewal that would push that to 2051.<\/p>\n Two other dead American reactors are behind Palisades in the same line. At Three Mile Island, the unit now called Crane got its first 500,000-pound transformer<\/a> on August 17 and still shows as SAFSTOR on the NRC’s page, with Microsoft waiting on the other end of the line<\/a>. Duane Arnold in Iowa<\/a> got a draft environmental assessment from the NRC in early August and is aiming for 2029. Palisades is the only one of the three with fuel in the vessel.<\/p>\n Palisades last sent electricity to the grid on May 20, 2022, and its vessel was empty by June 10 of that year. The eighth assembly went back in on August 31, 2026. The contract to deliver power to Wolverine and Hoosier comes due in March 2027.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A nuclear plant does nothing more routine than a refueling outage. Every 18 months or so the crew unbolts the … <\/p>\nEight assemblies in, 196 still in the pool<\/h2>\n
1,163 cracked tubes are why this is 2026 and not 2025<\/h2>\n
$491 million of federal money is already out the door<\/h2>\n
The lawsuit is gone, the inspectors are not<\/h2>\n