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

A nuclear plant in Michigan is close to becoming the first shut-down reactor in the U.S. to come back online. Holtec International, the company that bought the Palisades plant on Lake Michigan in 2018, says it has finished all major renovations on the reactor's generator side and has about 5,000 maintenance items left — a workload it compares to a routine outage at a normal operating plant. The reactor was shut down in 2022, part of a wave of nuclear plant closures over the past decade as utilities faced high repair costs and competition from cheap natural gas. Holtec has already missed two earlier restart targets, most recently early 2026, and would not give a new date.

For homeowners, this isn't something that affects rebates or upgrades directly, but it matters for the power grid. Once running, the plant's single 800-megawatt reactor could generate enough electricity to power every household in Detroit twice over. It was financed partly by a $1.52 billion federal loan approved under the Biden administration and kept moving under the Trump administration, suggesting continued government backing for nuclear power regardless of which party is in office.

If Palisades succeeds, it could set a precedent for restarting other closed nuclear plants, including Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania (now called Crane, backed by Microsoft) and Duane Arnold in Iowa (backed by Google). Several other former nuclear sites, including ones in California, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, are too far along in demolition to restart but could still be rebuilt.