A nuclear plant on the shore of Lake Michigan that shut down for good four years ago is now weeks or months away from producing electricity again, in what would be the first time in American history a retired commercial reactor has been brought back online. Palisades Nuclear Generating Station, in Covert Township, Michigan, ceased operating in 2022 after Entergy concluded it no longer made economic sense to keep running. Its new owner, Holtec International, is now racing to restart it, betting that the same wave of electricity demand from artificial intelligence data centers reshaping the U.S. power grid can justify resurrecting a plant that was, until recently, on a path toward permanent teardown. The attempt is being closely watched across the utility industry because more than a dozen other reactors were permanently retired nationwide over the past decade, and each one is a potential candidate for the same kind of revival if Palisades proves it can be done safely and on budget.
From Decommissioning To ‘Watershed Moment’
Holtec bought Palisades’ single 800-megawatt reactor in 2018 with plans to decommission the site and profit from the cleanup trust fund, the company’s long-standing business. That changed as skyrocketing electricity demand tied to the AI boom began reshaping utility planning nationwide; 2026 has emerged as a pivotal year for nuclear power, with roughly 15 reactors either under construction, newly online, or in the process of restarting across the country as utilities and tech companies look for carbon-free electricity that can run around the clock. Holtec announced in July 2026 that it had reached what the company called a “watershed moment,” completing the last of its major generator-side overhauls and moving into a final phase of roughly 5,000 remaining maintenance, testing, and inspection tasks that company officials compared to the workload of a routine refueling outage rather than a full reconstruction. The plant’s single reactor, first connected to the grid in 1971, was until its shutdown the oldest operating unit in the U.S. commercial fleet, adding a symbolic weight to Holtec’s attempt to bring one of the country’s most-worn reactors back rather than one of its newer ones.
The First Reactor Ever Un-Retired In NRC History
Getting to that point required a regulatory process with no real precedent. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission confirmed in July 2025 that it had approved the license transfer and a set of related license amendments needed to formally shift Palisades from decommissioning status back to an operating license, an action the agency described as historic since no U.S. commercial reactor had ever previously made that transition in reverse. Before that approval, Palisades had already been formally moved into the agency’s decommissioning oversight track after its 2022 shutdown, meaning regulators effectively had to reverse a process most nuclear plants only ever go through once, in one direction. Among the technical approvals was permission to repair the plant’s steam generator tubes using metal sleeves rather than the more common approach of permanently plugging damaged tubes, a fix regulators had to certify as safe for the plant’s return to service.
A $1.52 Billion Federal Bet
The restart is also a large financial gamble, backed heavily by federal money. The Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office finalized a $1.52 billion loan guarantee to Holtec in September 2024, the first loan issued under a newer clean-energy financing authority created by the Inflation Reduction Act. The loan has since been disbursed to Holtec in stages tied to construction milestones, and notably, the Trump administration, which froze many clean-energy programs after taking office, allowed the Palisades disbursements to keep moving, a rare instance of continuity across an otherwise sharp political turn on energy policy. Loan Programs Office officials have said the financing structure was designed specifically to make first-of-a-kind projects like a plant restart bankable for private lenders who would otherwise see the technical risk as too novel to underwrite alone. Michigan’s state government separately committed $300 million toward the project.
Inside The Final Stretch: Fuel Loading Begins
Crews began loading fresh fuel into Palisades’ reactor vessel on August 30, 2026, a milestone that puts the plant in the same final pre-startup phase as a plant coming back from a planned outage rather than a five-year shutdown. The comparison is not just rhetorical: the U.S. Energy Information Administration has found that the average planned nuclear refueling outage lasted 34 days in 2024, and Holtec has framed its remaining checklist, tightening bolts, removing scaffolding, finishing inspections, in similar terms. Holtec has also spent the run-up to fuel loading requalifying and training reactor operators, saying more than two dozen former Palisades employees renewed their federal licenses to work the plant again, alongside a newly hired class awaiting final exams. Even so, Holtec has already missed two earlier target restart dates, one aimed at the end of 2025 and a second at “early 2026,” and as of early September 2026 the company has not committed publicly to a specific new date.
What Powering Twice The Detroit Grid Would Mean
If Palisades does return to service, its 800 megawatts would be enough to supply roughly every household in Detroit twice over, according to estimates cited by outlets covering the restart, making it a meaningful addition to a Midwest grid under growing strain from new data centers. Palisades would also become the proof of concept for a small wave of similar projects: Constellation Energy’s shuttered Three Mile Island unit, being revived under a deal with Microsoft, and NextEra’s Duane Arnold plant in Iowa, backed by Google, are both aiming to follow Palisades back onto the grid later this decade. Whether any of those projects moves forward on schedule may depend heavily on whether Holtec can finally deliver on Palisades after two missed deadlines of its own. For now, though, the milestone that matters most in Covert Township is simpler: after four years of silence, radioactive fuel is back inside the reactor that once seemed destined only for demolition.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors.
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