America’s first nuclear plant restart may be near the finish line

Up until recently, the U.S. was in a yearslong dry spell in the construction of new nuclear power plants. The hiatus finally ended in April, when two next-generation nuclear developers broke ground on their debut plants.

Though those facilities will take years to finish, the next reactor set to patch onto the U.S. grid could be mere months away.

That’s because Holtec International, long known for its work decommissioning shuttered nuclear plants, is seeking to restart a defunct power station in Michigan — a first for the U.S.

Last week, the nuclear industry’s undertaker-turned-doula announced that it had reached a ​“watershed moment” by completing all major renovations for its reconstruction of the Palisades plant’s single 800-megawatt reactor, on Michigan’s western coast. While the checklist of 5,000 remaining maintenance issues sounds long, Holtec compared the outstanding workload to that for a routine refueling outage at an operational plant.

“At this point, what we’re doing is typical of a routine outage,” said Nick Culp, a longtime worker at the Palisades plant who now serves as Holtec’s senior manager of government affairs and communications.

The average length of a planned maintenance or refueling outage at a U.S. nuclear plant was 34 days as of 2024, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The longest planned outage in 2024 lasted roughly two months, though recent years have seen reactors idled for as long as three or four months.

It’s possible, of course, that Palisades’ timeline could drag on longer. Florida-headquartered Holtec has already missed two stated target dates for the restart, which it initially said would happen last year. After the firm failed to meet that deadline due to unexpected repair work, a spokesperson told Engineering News-Record that Holtec was aiming for early 2026 — which has now come and gone. Culp declined to comment on multiple questions about exactly when the company expects the reactor to come online.

But once Palisades does return to service, it could generate enough clean electricity to single-handedly power every household in Detroit twice over — and could also serve as a model for reviving other nuclear plants nationwide.

America’s turn away from nuclear

Previously owned by the utility giant Entergy, Palisades’ pressurized-water reactor was shut down in 2022, the last in a wave of nuclear plant closures brought on by the costs of repairing and relicensing facilities amid competition from relatively cheap natural gas and renewables.

In the 2010s, following decades of mostly flat electricity demand, debates over the future of American energy mirrored those seen in other Western democracies, primarily revolving around the strategic value of renewables versus fossil fuels. On the political right, which traditionally supported atomic power, enthusiasm for natural gas appeared to crowd out backing for reactors. On the left, which historically opposed nuclear energy, the falling prices of wind and solar seemed to make reconsidering atomic power unnecessary. Despite repeated warnings from federal researchers that growing industry and electrification would drive up power demand, policy discussions on both sides focused on promoting their preferred energy sources rather than preserving existing nuclear capacity.

So the U.S. allowed for 13 reactors to go out of business between 2013 and 2022 as the country prioritized natural gas. Those reactors represented roughly 10 gigawatts of output, roughly enough power to supply every household in Pennsylvania and New Jersey combined.

When Holtec bought the site in 2018, the plan was to demolish the facility and make money on the decommissioning fund. But in 2024, the company — which was already planning to expand into building and operating live reactors — proposed something that had never been tried in the U.S. before: restarting a shuttered plant. At that point, skyrocketing energy demand from the AI boom was beginning to foster renewed support for nuclear energy across the political spectrum.

Under the Biden administration, the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office awarded Holtec a $1.52 billion loan to finance the renovations needed to relicense Palisades’ 54-year-old reactor, previously the oldest in operation in the U.S. fleet. While the Trump administration froze all clean energy spending after taking office, the loan to Holtec was among the first the DOE allowed to move forward.

What went into the restart

Holtec took on the project in two parts. The first involved overhauling the reactor side of the plant, where atom-splitting reactions produce enormous amounts of heat that are used to turn water into steam. The second — the milestone completed last week — focused on repairing the generator side of the plant, where the steam spins turbine blades and generates electricity.

The work was significant. Holtec conducted the only deep cleaning of the station’s generator in more than half a century, including replacing all the degraded metal tubes in the steam and condenser systems, recoating all the metal in the electrical system to prevent corrosion, and disassembling the entire machine for its first full refurbishment. The company also saved the fuel left in the reactor after its final shutdown, and received a shipment of fresh fuel — currently stored on-site — to be loaded right before the plant starts back up.

Holtec went on a hiring and training spree, too. The company said it requalified 26 former plant operators to maintain their Nuclear Regulatory Commission licenses in addition to graduating a new class of specialists. A second class of newly hired operators is set to undergo final NRC licensing exams this month.

“We’re down to what we characterize as bulk work: routine maintenance activities,” Culp said. ​“At this point, if you’re out on the turbine deck, it looks fully assembled. We’re now going through the process to tighten everything up.”

Among the items on the to-do list: finishing up some of the pneumatic air controls, removing scaffolding, and carrying out inspections. Installation of a new instrument air-compression system just wrapped up on Monday, Culp said.

“It’s like cleaning up our work,” he said. ​“What we’re saying is we’re progressing toward the end of the process.”

What comes next

If Holtec is successful in restarting the first nuclear plant, it would make it easier for other defunct reactors to come online.

The first of those is Constellation Energy Generation’s Crane nuclear plant, formerly Three Mile Island. The station infamously lost one of its reactors in 1979 in the nation’s only major civilian nuclear accident. But the other unit stayed in service until 2019. Two years ago, Microsoft pledged $16 billion to reopen the plant’s operable reactor to supply its data centers with clean electricity. Just last month, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission cleared the way for the plant to patch back onto the grid as early as next year. The second is NextEra’s Duane Arnold nuclear plant. Last October, Google inked a deal with the utility to fund the restart of Iowa’s only atomic power station, which shut down in 2020. The plant could begin pumping out electricity by early 2029. It’s unclear whether either project would move forward if something happened to thwart Palisades’ progress.

At least five other nuclear stations could be rebuilt if not restarted. Experts widely agree that the demolition at California’s San Onofre, New York’s Indian Point, New Jersey’s Oyster Creek, Massachusetts’ Pilgrim, and the geographically eponymous Vermont Yankee is already too far along for the reactors themselves to be revived. But certain elements — the containment domes over the reactor chambers, for example — could be reused. Last fall, Holtec floated the idea of rebuilding a new reactor inside the existing facilities at Indian Point, which supplied much of New York City’s power until its final reactor closed in 2021. But Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, has rejected the idea, citing opposition from local officials in Westchester County.

Palisades’ completion would also pave the path for Holtec’s budding initiative to construct reactors from scratch. The company plans to build two of its SMR-300s, 300-megawatt pressurized-water reactors at Palisades. If successful, Holtec wants to build the units across the country, including at other sites it owns, such as Oyster Creek. In December, the Energy Department gave Holtec $400 million to support the SMR construction, although questions remain about the timelines and economic viability of the technology.

If nothing else, the Palisades restart serves as ​“an object lesson in the power and necessity” of the DOE’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing (the new name for the Loan Programs Office), said Emmet Penney, a historian of the nuclear industry and the director of energy and infrastructure at the Foundation for American Innovation, a right-leaning think tank that advocates for building more reactors in the U.S. Palisades’ rebirth also demonstrates that long-horizon nuclear projects can maintain government support even as the partisan pendulum swings in Washington, he said.

“It is proof positive of the bipartisan consensus around nuclear,” Penney said.