Energy Secretary Chris Wright on April 22 announced the release of a third loan disbursement to Holtec for the reopening of the Palisades Nuclear Plant in southwest Michigan.
Today’s action releases $46,709,358 of the up to $1.52-billion loan guarantee to Holtec for the Palisades project. The 800-MW Palisades plant, located in Covert Township, was closed in 2022. Holtec bought the power station from Entergy that year, with intent to decommission the facility, before deciding instead to restart the plant. Palisades at present would be the first U.S. nuclear power plant to restart after being closed. The plant still needs licensing approvals from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
“In advancing President Trump’s commitment to meet our growing demand for affordable, reliable and secure electricity, America needs to utilize all forms of energy that grow our economy, create new jobs, and secure energy independence,” said Wright. “With projects like the Palisades Nuclear Plant, the Energy Department is working to ensure America’s nuclear renaissance is just around the corner.”
The loan guarantee from the Dept. of Energy’s Loan Programs Office was announced in September 2024, during the Biden administration. The first disbursement of funds came in January 2025; the second was in March of this year.
The DOE a year ago said the Palisades project highlighted then-President Biden’s “Investing in America” agenda to “support good-paying, high-quality job opportunities in communities across the country while also expanding access to affordable clean energy resources.” The agency at that time said the project was expected to support or retain up to 600 jobs in Michigan, with many of those jobs going to workers who had been at the plant more than 20 years.
The DOE also said nearly half the workforce at the site would be union labor after the plant was restarted. The loan guarantee in part would support more than 1,000 jobs during the facility’s regularly scheduled refueling and maintenance periods every 18 months, according to the DOE.
Opponents of restarting the nuclear power plant have said they will appeal a recent decision by a three-judge panel of the NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, which refused to grant a hearing on the merits for seven safety-related contentions brought by a coalition that includes Beyond Nuclear, a nonprofit group. Beyond Nuclear and other groups have argued the plant should not be restarted.
Calls to restart closed U.S. nuclear power facilities have increased as utilities and other power generators, along with technology companies, look at ways to produce needed electricity—particularly from low-carbon energy resources—to provide energy for data centers and artificial intelligence. Microsoft last year announced a deal to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.
—Darrell Proctor is a senior editor for POWER.
