Palisades Nuclear Plant Restart (2026): When It Comes Back Online and What Went Wrong

Jump to comments

On the Lake Michigan shore about five miles south of South Haven, Michigan, a nuclear plant that was shut down for good in May 2022 is trying to do something no American reactor has done before: come back. Holtec International has spent more than two years and nearly $2 billion in public loans and grants rebuilding the Palisades Nuclear Plant, reloading fuel and restoring a license that had been rewritten to forbid it from ever running again. In late October 2026, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the reactor could be running within weeks. The company still has not named a date.

The short answer: as of mid-November 2026, Palisades has not restarted. It is in the refueling stage, the first of six operating modes a reactor climbs through before it makes power, after a fuel assembly tipped over inside the reactor in late August and took seven weeks to recover. Wright has floated the end of November. Holtec says only that it will restart when all required work is done and federal requirements are met, and it has a contract to start selling power by March 1, 2027. Here is where the restart stands, what went wrong, what still has to happen and how Palisades compares with the other two reactors trying to come back.

When will Palisades restart?

Nobody with the authority to flip the switch has committed to a date. During an October 29 tour of the plant, Wright told reporters the remaining tests and regulatory hurdles were few and that the reactor would be running before the end of the year, possibly as early as November 30, according to Engineering News-Record. He put it this way to Michigan Public:

So it’s just very careful, meticulous work things are going well…and it will be started in a few weeks. (Chris Wright, U.S. Secretary of Energy, at Palisades, October 29, 2026)

Holtec has been more careful. Its spokesman told ENR the plant will restart "when all required work is complete and all applicable U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission requirements and industry standards are met." The company has missed its own targets before: it first aimed to make power around October 2025, and the project has slipped by about a year.

Even "restart" is not a single moment. Once the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) clears the plant to start up, a Holtec spokesman told Michigan Public, the reactor will be taken slowly from low power to full power over several weeks. The date that matters most commercially is March 1, 2027, when Holtec is contracted to begin selling power. If Wright’s timeline holds, the first electricity could reach the grid around the turn of the year. If it does not, that March date is the one to watch.

Why a closed nuclear plant is coming back

Palisades is a single pressurized water reactor built by Combustion Engineering. It began producing power in 1971 and ran for half a century, by its last full year reaching a 99.2% capacity factor, meaning it ran almost flat out. Its owner at the time, Entergy, closed it on May 20, 2022, for financial reasons, and had all the fuel out of the reactor by June 10. Holtec bought it that June to tear it down, with a decommissioning plan that ran to 2041.

Then the politics of electricity changed. Michigan’s governor asked for federal help to keep the plant open even before it closed, demand for steady, carbon-free power began climbing, and Holtec reversed course. The Department of Energy closed a $1.52 billion loan for the restart in September 2024, the state added $300 million, and two rural power cooperatives, Wolverine Power Cooperative and Hoosier Energy, signed long-term deals to buy the output. According to the Department of Energy, the goal is firm, around-the-clock power until at least 2051 for the Midwest grid run by MISO.

What comes back is big. The reactor is licensed for about 2,565 megawatts of heat and turns that into 805 megawatts of electricity, which Holtec says is enough for more than 800,000 homes and businesses. That is roughly a third of the heat becoming electricity, typical for a reactor of this design; the rest goes out through two cooling towers. In 2021, its last full year, Palisades put out about 7 million megawatt-hours.

How Palisades got un-retired on paper

When a U.S. nuclear plant retires, its owner certifies to the NRC that it has permanently stopped operating and permanently removed the fuel. From then on, the license no longer allows fuel in the reactor. No one had ever tried to undo that, and the NRC set up a special restart panel and a new inspection program written for reactors coming back from retirement.

The paperwork took about two years. On July 24, 2025, the NRC approved the main package: it transferred operating authority to Holtec’s Palisades Energy subsidiary and reinstated the plant’s technical specifications, emergency plan, security plan and quality assurance program. A month later, on August 25, 2025, Palisades rescinded its old retirement certifications and formally became an operating plant again, the first in the country to move from decommissioning back to operations, Holtec said. It runs under its existing license, which expires on March 24, 2031. Holtec has told the NRC it plans to seek another license renewal to run longer.

What went wrong: the delays

The restart has run into three big problems and one quieter one. None stopped the project, but together they explain why the reactor that was meant to run in late 2025 is still cold.

Cracked steam generator tubes

A pressurized water reactor passes its heat through steam generators, huge heat exchangers packed with thousands of thin tubes that keep the radioactive reactor water separate from the clean steam that spins the turbine. Inspections in 2024 found about 1,400 steam generator tubes with cracks that needed repairs, Michigan Public reported. Instead of plugging them all, which would have permanently cut the generators’ capacity, Holtec asked the NRC to let it reinforce damaged tubes with sleeves, shorter tubes of a tougher alloy fitted inside the old ones. The NRC approved that change in October 2025. In March 2026, the company sent the NRC a final assessment concluding that the steam generators can be expected to meet performance standards through the next operating cycle.

A fuel assembly that tipped over

Fuel loading finally began on August 30, 2026. The core holds 204 fuel assemblies, a mix of new fuel and partly used fuel from the plant’s last operating years, according to the American Nuclear Society. Early in the process, one of the used assemblies tilted from its upright position after the fuel-handling machine had let go of it, coming to rest at about 30 degrees. Nobody was hurt and no radioactive material was released, but the top fitting was damaged badly enough that the normal machine could not grab it.

Holtec built a custom lifting tool and a sealed transfer canister and asked the NRC for a one-time license amendment to use them, because fuel normally never leaves the water during a move. Nearby residents objected that the method was untested. Regulators approved it in mid-October, and on October 21 Holtec said the assembly was safely in the spent fuel pool. Fuel loading then resumed. The company and the NRC are still investigating why the assembly tipped.

A rare safety-culture warning

On October 13, the NRC sent Holtec a letter finding a "chilled work environment" in two Palisades departments, supply chain and quality assurance, where employees told inspectors they were reluctant to raise safety concerns for fear of retaliation, including being fired. The agency found no violations and said the issue should not affect the restart, but it told Holtec to commission an independent evaluation and send a corrective action plan, which was due by November 13. David Lochbaum, a former nuclear safety director at the Union of Concerned Scientists who opposes the restart, told ENR such letters are "very rare."

That is why the letter matters even without a violation. Palisades does not have to prove that a reactor can run. It has to prove that a retired one can be trusted to run again. Supply chain and quality assurance are the departments that decide whether a replacement part is good enough to install, a big part of the work in any restart.

Palisades does not have to prove that a reactor can run. It has to prove that a retired one can be trusted to run again.

Layoffs and a leadership shuffle

In early November, Axios Pro reported that Holtec had cut hundreds of workers and reshuffled its leadership as the restart fell about a year behind schedule. Holtec told ENR that the project peaked at more than 2,000 workers and that it is reducing contractor staffing as the plant moves from a construction project to long-term operations. In its statement, the company said "leadership transitions are a normal part of managing a project of this scale and complexity."

What still has to happen before Palisades makes power

A reactor does not go from loaded to running in one step. Under the plant’s technical specifications, it climbs through six numbered operating modes, from refueling to full power, and each step comes with its own required tests, as ENR laid out. Here is the order:

Mode 6, refueling (where Palisades is now): finish loading all 204 assemblies, check each against the core design and put the reactor vessel’s heavy steel head back on.

Mode 5, cold shutdown: once the core is loaded and the vessel reassembled, the plant moves to cold shutdown, and systems are readied for higher temperatures while the reactor stays shut down and cool.

Modes 4 and 3, hot shutdown and hot standby: the reactor coolant heats up to normal operating temperature and pressure while the reactor itself stays shut down, and operators run the required checks on pumps, valves and safety systems.

Mode 2, startup: operators pull control rods and let the chain reaction begin for the first time since 2022, then run low-power physics tests to confirm the core behaves the way the design says it should.

Mode 1, power operation: power rises in steps, the turbine spins up and the generator is synchronized to the grid. That path is already rebuilt: workers reconnected the plant to its 345-kilovolt switchyard on September 11, 2026.

Each step can surface problems that a plant sitting cold for four years would not have revealed. That is the honest reason no one, including the NRC, will put a firm date on it.

How Palisades compares with the other U.S. reactor restarts

Palisades is the first of three retired American reactors trying to come back. The other two have tech companies buying their power and later target dates, which means they are watching Palisades to see how long each step really takes.

Plant	Size	Closed	Who is buying the power	Federal loan	Target
Palisades, Michigan (Holtec)	805 MW	May 2022	Wolverine Power Cooperative and Hoosier Energy	$1.52 billion (closed Sept. 2024)	No official date; must sell power by March 1, 2027
Crane Clean Energy Center (Three Mile Island Unit 1), Pennsylvania (Constellation)	About 835 MW	September 2019	Microsoft, 20-year deal	$1 billion (closed Nov. 2025)	Second half of 2027
Duane Arnold, Iowa (NextEra Energy)	615 MW	2020	Google, 25-year deal	Up to $1.9 billion (closed Sept. 2026)	No later than first quarter of 2029

We covered the Pennsylvania project in detail in our explainer on the Three Mile Island restart, including why the reactor coming back is not the one that partly melted down in 1979.

Quick answers about the Palisades restart

Is this really the first time a U.S. nuclear plant has restarted?

Reactors restart after refueling outages all the time, and a few have returned after long, unplanned shutdowns. What has never happened in the United States is a plant coming back after its owner formally certified it had permanently stopped operating and removed the fuel. Palisades would be the first.

Is the restart safe?

The NRC has approved each licensing step so far and says the culture finding does not affect the restart, and the August fuel incident released no radiation. Critics disagree sharply. Kevin Kamps of the group Don’t Waste Michigan told Michigan Public that once the "zombie reactor" restarts, "all bets are off." The NRC’s inspectors will still have to sign off on each step before power operations begin.

Can you see the plant?

Not up close. Like every U.S. nuclear plant since September 11, 2001, Palisades is closed to the public. You can see it from neighboring Van Buren State Park, just to the north along the Lake Michigan shore.

What are the new reactors planned at Palisades?

Holtec plans two of its own SMR-300 small modular reactors on the same site and filed a partial construction permit application with the NRC in January 2026. They are years away; Holtec has said it expects them by the start of the next decade. Small reactors are moving slowly everywhere, as we found when we looked at what TVA’s first U.S. small modular reactor permit does and does not mean.

The bottom line

Palisades is the test case for an idea that suddenly has billions of dollars behind it: that the fastest way to add steady, carbon-free power is to bring back the reactors the country already shut. It has proven the paperwork can be undone and the hardware can be rebuilt. It has also shown how much can go wrong in between, from cracked tubes to a tipped fuel assembly to a warning about whether workers feel safe speaking up. If the reactor reaches full power this winter, Three Mile Island and Duane Arnold will follow a path Palisades cleared. If it slips past March, they will have learned something too.

Related on aglena: Helion’s Polaris Fusion Machine: Electricity From Fusion in 2026?, Nature’s Nuclear Reactor: How Uranium in Gabon Ran Its Own Chain Reaction Two Billion Years Ago

Further reading