The Palisades Nuclear Generating Station is nestled between sand dunes on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. It shut down for financial reasons in 2022. Three years later, it’s on the cusp of reopening, with hundreds of workers streaming through its security barriers every day.
Palisades is on track to restart in early 2026. When it does, it will be the first nuclear plant in the United States to generate electricity again after being decommissioned. Nick Culp of Holtec, the company that owns the plant, said its revival is a response to a surge in demand for electricity.
“We have seen [Michigan]’s baseload generation go offline at a rapid rate as they’ve moved away from fossil generation,” Culp said. “How do you backfill that when you see demand on the horizon like [artificial intelligence], like data storage, like keeping the lights on at home, and new manufacturing?”
Nuclear is part of the answer to that question, Culp said, and the government agrees. Michigan gave $300 million to the restart — part of its goal to have 100% carbon-free electricity by 2040 — and the federal government gave the project a loan of more than $1.5 billion.
That money is part of the Trump administration’s investment in what it’s calling a “nuclear energy renaissance.” In May, the White House released a plan to quadruple American nuclear power by 2050, following a similar pledge from the Biden administration.
Meeting that goal would require dozens of new reactors. But whether they’re traditional power plants or new designs, nuclear power is expensive and slow to build. Facing a crunch between climate goals and rising electricity demand, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Iowa are reopening plants in the meantime that closed just a few years ago.
Powering up
When the Palisades plant in Michigan closed in 2022, Jim Byrd said he left his office of more than two decades “with a heavy heart.”
He was working at a nuclear plant in Mississippi last year when he heard about the plan to reboot Palisades. Then he got the call he had been waiting for, asking him to come back.
“Palisades is my home. These people are my family,” Byrd said. Since his return, he’s been training new employees in an exact replica of the reactor control room, right down to its 1960s pink-and-green color scheme.
While the plant was in decent shape, recommissioning still required repairing equipment and overcoming mountains of paperwork.
“We are creating a roadmap on how to do this, and the whole industry is watching,” said Byrd. “I had existing licensed operators that had a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission when we shut down, so we had to work on getting those back.”
All that work is worth it, he said, to get the plant back up and running.
“What we’re doing here is exciting,” said Byrd. “Having a reliable power source that keeps your electricity costs low, everybody should be rooting for that.”
The restart also attracted employees from elsewhere in the industry. The plant’s new chief nuclear officer, Rich Burroni, came from New York’s Indian Point Energy Center, which closed in 2021.
“The trend five years ago was a lot of work on decommissioning,” he said, “and now that’s all changed.”
More change may be coming for Palisades. The Department of Energy said this month it will give Holtec up to $400 million in federal funding to build small modular reactors in Michigan. That technology could help speed up the deployment of new nuclear power in the future, according to many in the industry, but so far has not been commercially viable.
For now, restarting a plant costs less than a third of what it would take to build a new one, said Culp of Holtec.
“When you factor in how long it takes to construct a new nuclear power plant, especially here in the United States, and the amount of money that goes into it,” he said, “it’s a pretty good value proposition.”
‘Taken for granted’
Many of Palisades’ employees live within 10 miles of the plant, which means they could be exposed to a radioactive plume in an emergency.
That zone also includes the town of Covert, Michigan. Township supervisor Daywi Cook’s father helped build the plant in the 1960s.
“I grew up with the sirens being tested. I think it was every last Saturday of the month,” Cook said. “It was just a normal thing.”
Having friends and family members who worked at the plant helped demystify nuclear power, she said, and she came to see the plant as part of the community.
At one point, taxes from the plant made up 40% of the township’s revenue. Now, as Covert’s township supervisor, Cook said she’s glad the plant is reopening.
“Having that stability and having that employment available for folks who live here is something that I think was taken for granted for a very long time,” she said. “I think what’s important is that we educate ourselves as residents near the plant and that Holtec continues to be a good neighbor in being transparent with the community.”
Zach Morris, head of the economic development group Market One, said Pallisades is an important piece of the local economy.
“Southwest Michigan is a beautiful area. It’s just a wonderful community of small towns. I call it Americana,” Morris said. “Americana needs electricity. So the good news is we have a really reliable source of power that is clean. It pays its employees well. So we’re excited about being able to keep that online.”
Not everyone is on board with the plant’s reopening. Environmental groups have sued to stop it, and protesters have raised concerns about the long-term storage of spent fuel next to the Great Lakes.
Three Mile Island
While nuclear power does have a record of safety, many Americans remember the 1979 disaster at central Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island. One of the two reactors on the island had a partial meltdown and released radioactive gases into the environment. There were no deaths, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said the accident “had no detectable health effects on plant workers or the public.”
That left the plant with only one working reactor, which produced power until 2019, when it shut down for financial reasons. Today, that reactor, like Palisades in western Michigan, is in the process of coming back online.
“When you walk through the plant now, all the equipment is still there, but it’s deathly quiet. You don’t hear the hum of the motors, the steam going through the lines,” said Craig Smith, who is in charge of bringing back the plant at Three Mile Island, renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center. “It’s an eerie kind of feeling when you walk through the plant.”
That eerie feeling may soon be gone. A red LCD clock in Smith’s office counts down the hours until the plant’s reopening in late 2027, which is backed by a billion-dollar loan from the Trump Administration.
The recommissioned reactor on Three Mile Island will pump 835 megawatts into the regional grid, but all that electricity is spoken for by Microsoft, which agreed to buy an equivalent amount of power from the grid for the next 20 years to feed its data centers.
“The dynamics of the energy economy have changed significantly, mainly because of artificial intelligence,” Smith said.
Nuclear is well-suited to the moment, in his view, because of its consistency.
“Hottest days of the year, coldest days of the year, freezing weather, the plant continues to operate,” Smith said. “As far as a reliable power source, you can’t beat it.”
Smith was in high school in nearby Hershey in 1979 and remembers the evacuation after the disaster at Three Mile Island. That failed to dissuade him from going into a career in nuclear power, and he said today, the industry is safer because of regulations put in place after the partial meltdown.
“People at the plant here take that personally,” he said. “The standards of the industry are greatly improved, and we’ve made significant improvements to the design of the plants and how we operate them.”
‘No viable solution’
Gene Stilp has a different take. He’s one of many people in the area who say the official story of the 1979 disaster failed to account for long-term health problems they believe are related to the accident.
Stilp has been fighting nuclear power on Three Mile Island since before the plant opened, and said the recommissioning is an unnecessary risk to public safety.
“We’re sticking up for the people who live here rather than the shareholders of Microsoft and Constellation,” said Stilp, who often appears in public wearing a blazer with “NO TMI RESTART” sewn on the back.
“What they’re proposing for evacuation does not work, and so that’s my line in the sand,” he said, pointing out the 10-mile Emergency Planning Zone includes a major hospital complex and several schools. “The population increases in Central Pennsylvania, the realization that there are so many people at risk here, the best you can do is take away that risk.”
Another longtime opponent of the power plant, Eric Epstein of Three Mile Island Alert, said the country is making mistakes in its rush to power data centers. He said the economics might have changed for nuclear power, but the risks have not.
“There was no public discussion about whether or not we’re going to restart Three Mile Island,” said Epstein. “You had this psychic tear in the fabric of the community that can’t be papered over. You can put all the green paint you want on nuclear power, but there has been no viable solution to isolate nuclear waste.”
Constellation said the spent fuel on site has been safely stored on the island for decades, in fortified containers required by the government to withstand natural disasters, and that all the waste created in 40 years fits in an area about the size of two tennis courts.
Dauphin County Commissioner Justin Douglas said he’s listening to local concerns about the plant’s reopening.
“I personally am very interested in transparency and accountability for this in the sense of ensuring that it’s as safe as it possibly can be, that we’re tracking the cost and ensuring that the taxpayers aren’t carrying any of the burden, that we have a good plan for the waste management and that ultimately the community impact is positive,” said Douglas. “We plan for the worst, and we hope for the best.”
‘A slam dunk’
Meeting the country’s rising demand for electricity will take a lot more than reviving a few recently decommissioned plants.
“It is a brilliant idea. It’s sort of a slam dunk. The downside is that there are not many reactors out there that are realistically able to restart,” said Jacopo Buongiorno, professor of nuclear science and engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You’re looking at a little bit less than three gigawatts of electricity, out of 50 that apparently are required for data centers and AI.”
There are also technical tweaks called uprates that can squeeze more power out of existing plants, which could help blunt the immediate electricity crunch.
“You probably have potential for another five to eight gigawatts across the whole fleet. So you add that up to the two or three that we get from the restarts, you’re looking at 10 [gigawatts],” Buongiorno said, or only about a fifth of the total AI power demand expected by 2030.
“If that demand continues in the 2030s, then you can make the investment now to build new reactors,” he said, “and then nuclear can actually capture a lot more than 20%.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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