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The starting gun for the long-promised U.S. nuclear renaissance might have just gone off.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced late last week that it has granted several key approvals that Holtec International needs to restart Michigan’s 800-megawatt Palisades Nuclear Plant three years after the facility shut down. Although the project still needs to clear some federal hurdles, the NRC’s action signals its intention to give Holtec the full go-ahead.
If Holtec succeeds in bringing Palisades back online this year as promised, it would be the first nuclear plant in the U.S. to restart after being closed down. Remarkably, it would be just the second or third reactor to come back online in the global history of civilian nuclear power.
Holtec President Kelly Trice praised the NRC’s move in a statement, calling it “an unprecedented milestone in U.S. nuclear energy.” The company expects the plant to come back online before the end of the year — an extremely ambitious target given the uncharted regulatory territory of a reactor restart and the industry’s history of construction delays.
Located on Lake Michigan and a two-hour drive from Chicago, the Palisades plant started producing electricity on New Year’s Eve 1971 and was shuttered a half-century later in May 2022 by utility Entergy because of cost issues. It was America’s eighth-oldest nuclear plant at the time of its closing, with a troubled history of temporary shutdowns due to equipment failures. Although its performance improved in the later years of the plant’s operation, Palisades closed 11 days ahead of its scheduled shutdown because of a reliability issue.
Holtec — whose main lines of business are decommissioning reactors and managing nuclear waste — bought the plant in June 2022. But just weeks into the decommissioning process, it made the surprise revelation that it intended to revive the plant instead. Up until that point, Holtec had no experience in constructing, operating, or restarting a nuclear power plant.
Despite that lack of experience, the relatively speedy NRC approval means that Holtec can now reinstall uranium fuel in the reactor as soon as August and begin the work of restarting the complex nuclear facility. About 600 full-time workers are currently employed at the plant.
Palisades is not the only shuttered reactor that’s being considered for reopening as part of the U.S. strategy to jump-start its flatlined nuclear industry. Last year, Microsoft announced a multibillion-dollar plan with plant operator Constellation Energy to restart Three Mile Island Unit 1 in Pennsylvania by 2028; it had been decommissioned in 2019 because of poor economics. Power provider NextEra Energy is also weighing reanimating Iowa’s only nuclear plant, the 50-year-old reactor at the Duane Arnold Energy Center, which closed in 2020 because of storm damage and cost issues.
Nuclear power has newfound social license in the U.S. Citizen support has climbed in recent years. The U.S., along with more than 20 other countries, vowed to triple nuclear power capacity by 2050 during the COP28 global climate conference in 2023.
Nuclear is now viewed by many as crucial to meeting the soaring electricity demand that’s being driven by an AI-spurred data-center frenzy along with the electrification of transportation and industry. Tech giants in particular are hungry for the clean, firm, 24/7 power that nuclear plants can provide, as their data centers crave round-the-clock electricity.
Aside from renaming post offices, bolstering nuclear power is the rare type of policy that can gain bipartisan agreement — the Biden administration initiated this atomic energy rally, and the Trump admin is maintaining its momentum.
Trump’s recent set of executive orders on nuclear power sped up the licensing process and minimized regulatory burdens, all in the service of fostering American “energy dominance.”
So it’s a good time to be a nuclear plant operator. Notoriously expensive nuclear reactors can now claim a bundle of incentives and subsidies. Consider all the goodies Holtec will be able to take advantage of.
Not everyone is enthusiastic about the Palisades reactor restart.
Kevin Kamps of anti-nuclear organization Beyond Nuclear told Canary Media that the NRC is “under tremendous pressure” and “bowing to Holtec’s schedule” as it “pushes the envelope on risk.”
He wrote in a statement, “The zombie reactor restart scheme is unneeded, insanely expensive for the public, and extremely high risk for health, safety, security, and the environment.”
The advocacy organization claims that Holtec “neglected critical safety maintenance from 2022 to 2024.” Beyond Nuclear is particularly worried about the impact of corrosion on a massive, expensive, and critical part of the reactor: the steam generator.
There are thousands of steam generator tubes in a pressurized water reactor like Palisades. In instances of corrosion, they are routinely re-sleeved or plugged, but Arnie Gundersen, a former nuclear engineer and whistleblower, has testified in NRC proceedings that “the failure of a single tube would result in a release of radioactivity to the environment” and “a cascading failure of tubes could cause a reactor core meltdown and catastrophic release of hazardous radioactivity.”
Beyond Nuclear intends to appeal the NRC’s green light for restart once it’s finalized.
Unfortunately, restarting a few vintage plants would contribute little toward the broader goal of building hundreds of gigawatts of low-cost nuclear power. There just aren’t enough eligible decommissioned nuclear plants to make much of a difference.
Nuclear enthusiasts rave about the prospects for small modular reactors and other advanced reactors, with their novel designs, coolants, and fuels. But while those technologies are engineering marvels, they won’t do anything to drive down costs in the next few years.
A more direct solution to growing the U.S. nuclear fleet (and keeping up with a surging China) would be to build tried and tested models of big, traditional nuclear plants over and over again. Venture capital-funded consortia such as The Nuclear Co. and other parties are planning to do just that: deploy fleets of full-scale, licensed, and standardized reactor designs on sites with existing construction and operating licenses. It’s a strategy to avoid the first-of-a-kind shock of building a newer generation of reactor like Georgia’s Vogtle 3, which was years late and billions over budget.
Meanwhile, the NRC’s forthcoming approval of the Palisades recommissioning is a morale booster for the U.S. nuclear industry, which has needed to put some wins and megawatts on the board.
A correction was made on July 30, 2025: This story originally misstated which federal tax credits the Palisades plant would be eligible for if it restarted. The plant would be eligible for the 45Y production tax credit for new nuclear, not the 45U production tax credit for existing nuclear.
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