Palisades Nuclear Plant on the Eastern shore of Lake Michigan shut down in 2022 due to rising costs and an unfriendly regulatory environment. It was purchased by Holtec, Inc., which immediately set out to fix the plant's numerous problems and reopen it.
The company created a self-imposed deadline of October 2025 to reopen. If they're successful, Palisades would be the first nuclear plant to reopen after being shut down.
Another shuttered plant in Iowa, the Duane Arnold nuclear plant, is also working on recommissioning the facility. NextEra Energy bought the plant when it was decommissioned in 2020 after it lost one of its major customers. The company is shooting for a restart by the end of 2028.
Big Tech is the major driver behind reopening decommissioned nuclear plants. The enormous amounts of energy it takes to run artificial intelligence systems have resulted in a nuclear renaissance. Even Joe Biden recognized the need, despite fanatical opposition from the usual "green" suspects who hate nuclear power. His administration granted Holtec a $1.2 billion loan to recommission Palisades.
Once back online, the plant will deliver 800 megawatts of carbon-free energy, sold directly to two utility providers: Wolverine Power Cooperative and Hoosier Energy. That amount of electricity is expected to power around 800,000 homes.
As you might expect, there are some naysayers. Some former employees of the plant believe that Holtec is going about recommissioning the plant the wrong way.
Blind, who once served as vice president for American Electric Power, told the Washington Examiner that his concerns aren’t with nuclear energy itself. In fact, he raved over the restart of Three Mile Island, calling it the “poster child” for how to restart a decommissioned plant.
Instead, Blind has pointed to safety concerns over Palisades’s design standards, decades-old steam generators, and lack of restart rules issued specifically by the NRC, as well as the fact that Holtec has never run a nuclear facility. For example, Blind noted that amid decommissioning, the plant failed to place some systems in the process of wet layup that would have helped avoid corrosion in the steam generators.
“This is basically a junk car that’s been sitting in the junkyard, and we don’t know anything about it, right?” Blind said.
Hoiltec is already working on fixing stress corrosion cracking that has affected more than 1,400 tubes across two steam generator units. Rather than replace all the tubes, Holtec will fit a "sleeve" over them to cover any damage.
It's a technique used worldwide, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) hasn't signed off on the sleeving process for Palisades.
“From a project management point of view, there’s just huge risk,” Blind said. “And then we’ve all learned, when you try to do too much in too little time, things become unmanageable very quickly.”
The NRC may not sign off on the sleeving process until August. If they turn Holtec down, it will likely delay the plant's decommissioning for up to a year.
Big Tech, which has been touting its green bona fides for more than a decade by subsidizing zero-emission schemes for wind and solar, has known that it can't use "renewable" energy to run its AI systems. Those data centers need reliable electricity 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. something that wind and solar can't give them.
“The tech companies have been putting their data centers where the correct spot was for them on the grid, not where the renewables were,” says Mark Nelson, the chief executive of consultancy Radiant Energy Group. “They’ve been powering them with constant power generation [from coal and gas] while only funding intermittent power generation.”
The future certainly looks bright for Holtec in the coming age of AI.
Holtec’s president, Kelly Trice, says: “Everybody that’s got a data center or is trying to develop AI is talking to us, whether it’s Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon or Oracle – all of them.”
Recommissioning a nuclear plant is one way to go to get massive amounts of energy. But the future will see several different kinds of nuclear options, including what is known as "Small Modular Reactors" (SMR), as well as "micro-reactors."
These aren't exactly "Mr. Fusion" gadgets, but are small enough to supply any data center in the world with plenty of energy.
