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A Michigan nuclear plant is looking to make history not once but twice over: First by restarting a reactor shuttered in 2022 and second with newly solidified plans to build the nation’s first small modular reactors.
Holtec International — the nuclear company best known for decommissioning shuttered plants and manufacturing the canisters that store spent fuel — bought the Palisades nuclear plant on the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan a month after utility giant Entergy took the financially troubled single-reactor facility offline.
Last year, the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office finalized a deal to give Holtec $1.52 billion to bring the 55-year-old, 800-megawatt pressurized water reactor back online. The company wants to plug the facility back into the grid by the end of this year.
Now Holtec plans to nearly double the electricity output from Palisades by building two of its own small modular reactors, or SMRs, at the site.
On Tuesday, top executives gathered at the facility in Covert Township, Michigan, to unveil blueprints for adding a pair of its proprietary SMR-300s and announce Hyundai Engineering and Construction Co. — the South Korean firm already working with the Florida-based Holtec to develop its 300-MW units internationally — as its partner in the debut U.S. project. Completing the reactor would be a first not just for the country but the company. While Holtec has disassembled reactors, it has yet to build one, much less its own design.
“If we can’t do it, I don’t know who else is going to do it,” Rick Springman, the president of Holtec’s Global Clean Energy Opportunities division, told Canary Media ahead of the event. “I really think we can be the horse America can ride to a clean-energy future and to enable AI and everything else we want to do in this global competition.”
First, Holtec will need the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s approval of its reactor design.
So far, the U.S. federal regulator has only approved one SMR, Oregon-based NuScale Power’s 50 MW unit. The first plant designed around NuScale’s reactors, a 720 MW station built on property owned by the Idaho National Laboratory to provide power to ratepayers in Utah, was scrapped in November 2023 amid rising costs.
2024 marked a breakout year for nuclear power in the U.S., as Congress passed new legislation to streamline reactor regulations, Microsoft put up $16 billion to reopen the mothballed unit at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island, and SMR developers lined up major deals with Amazon and Google.
Yet no SMR developer got the green light from the NRC to become the nation’s second certified design.
“Most of our competitors are essentially offering the technology but don’t want to take any risk,” Springman said.
In other words, those developers will design and license the technology and make money off the intellectual property, he said, but utilities and construction firms must provide the financing, time, and materials.
“You have this stagnation where no one wants to stand behind the project,” Springman said. “Enter Holtec. We can manufacture the parts, build the plant, and arrange the financing for the project. We can also manage the spent fuel … and we can decommission the plant at end of life. We can do the entire spectrum of the project. There’s no U.S. company that can offer all of that.”
Holtec is betting its decades of manufacturing know-how, experience managing complex nuclear projects, and early engagement with federal regulators will secure approval fast enough to construct both its SMRs in the next five years — a breakneck speed by the standards of reactor construction.
The only two new reactors built from scratch in the U.S. in decades were completed at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in northern Georgia last spring. The pair of 1,100 MW Westinghouse AP1000s followed the NRC’s part 52 combined licensing pathway, which granted approval to build and operate the reactors. While the approach was meant to get the units online faster than the traditional licensing process, the design tweaks that needed to be made during the first-of-a-kind build required repeatedly going back to the NRC for approvals that delayed the project and helped drive it billions of dollars over budget.
Instead, Holtec said it would follow the traditional part 50 process, which requires the company to obtain the construction and operating licenses separately.
“We prefer part 50 because we believe on a first-of-a-kind project, there’s less regulatory risk and more flexibility in that process to allow for learnings during construction,” Springman said.
Holtec started talks with the NRC five years ago and “over the last three years really stepped up engagement” by submitting white papers and topical reports, he said.
The company said it plans to submit the first part of its construction permit application in the first quarter of 2026 and the second part in the second quarter of 2027, then apply for an operating license in the first three months of 2029.
Thanks to conversations already underway, Springman said, Holtec will have incorporated the NRC’s feedback into its application by the time it submits paperwork. “They know it’s coming, and we have reduced risk from a regulatory perspective,” he said.
Already, Holtec updated the design of its SMR, nearly doubling the output of the proposed machine from 160 MW to the 300 MW model the company is now planning to build. Research by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests the cheapest reactor to build in the U.S. next, however, would be another AP1000, since the design is settled and the size allows power-plant owners to benefit from economies of scale.
“I love the idea of restoring nuclear operation to sites that have lost it, and I love even more building new reactors where we had fewer,” said Mark Nelson, a nuclear engineer and founder of the consultancy Radiant Energy Group. “It’ll be interesting to see whether the right size of reactor is smaller or larger in the future.”
Despite some pushback from antinuclear groups, the project is gaining local political backing. In December, the board of commissioners in Michigan’s Van Buren County voted to support construction of the SMRs.
“I’m thrilled — it’d be historic,” said Shawn Connors, 69, a retired technical publisher who grew up in Kalamazoo, owns a condo in South Haven, about five miles north of the Palisades plant, and now volunteers as an advocate for nuclear power. “Palisades might become the focus of the world because this is where you can have the old [pressurized water reactor] operating and two new SMRs operating right next to it. You’ve got the old and the new right there together.”
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