Three American nuclear reactors that have been offline for years are about to start generating electricity again. Palisades in Michigan, the Crane Clean Energy Center at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, and Duane Arnold in Iowa will bring a combined 2.25 GW back onto the grid. The three Department of Energy (DOE) loans total up to $4.42 billion.
Palisades is the furthest along. Holtec began loading fuel in August 2026 and is targeting 800 MW around March 2027, the date by which its supply contracts require the plant to be in service. Fuel loading was halted over a fuel assembly that had tilted from the vertical position, and Holtec wanted to understand the cause before proceeding. The plant stopped producing power in 2022 and was already in the decommissioning process. No commercial reactor is known to have returned to service after decommissioning began, so Palisades would be the first.
Crane, the former Unit 1 at Three Mile Island, is rated at 835 MW. Constellation expects to spend $1.6 billion on the restart and secured a $1 billion DOE loan in November 2025. Duane Arnold, at 615 MW, has been offline since 2020. NextEra Energy will restart it with Google, which is funding the work through a 25-year power purchase agreement. In September 2026 the project received a $1.9 billion DOE loan. The restart date has slipped from late 2028 to early 2029, and NextEra has already ordered the generator and cooling towers.
All three plants closed before their licenses expired because the electricity they produced was considered too expensive. That picture has changed with demand from artificial intelligence data centers. Morgan Stanley estimates a 32 GW power shortfall in the United States by 2028, and building a new reactor takes years. Reactivating existing plants, with licenses valid through 2031 and grid connections already in place, is the fastest way to add nuclear capacity.
NextEra CEO John Ketchum explained that with a long-term contract with a major cloud operator, no costs fall on Iowa residential customers. The financing structure shifts the risk onto federal credit lines and industrial buyers. The 2.25 GW is enough for about 2 million homes.
If Palisades meets its 2027 deadline, the model will have a concrete proof point. Other reactors closed for economic reasons in recent years, from Oyster Creek to Pilgrim, could be reassessed under the same scheme: a public loan and a twenty-year contract with a large buyer.
