{"id":3961,"date":"2026-10-17T08:02:16","date_gmt":"2026-10-17T06:02:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/energianucleare.eu\/doe-lends-up-to-4-4-billion-to-restart-three-shuttered-nuclear-plants\/"},"modified":"2026-10-17T08:02:16","modified_gmt":"2026-10-17T06:02:16","slug":"doe-lends-up-to-4-4-billion-to-restart-three-shuttered-nuclear-plants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/energianucleare.eu\/en\/doe-lends-up-to-4-4-billion-to-restart-three-shuttered-nuclear-plants\/","title":{"rendered":"DOE Lends Up to $4.4 Billion to Restart Three Shuttered Nuclear Plants"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The United States is attempting to bring three closed nuclear plants back online. The <strong>Department of Energy<\/strong> is lending up to $4.4 billion to restart Palisades in Michigan, the Crane Clean Energy Center at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, and Duane Arnold in Iowa. Together they total 2.25 gigawatts, enough to power roughly 2 million homes and businesses.<\/p>\n<p>No commercial reactor is known to have resumed generating electricity once decommissioning began, which makes the effort unprecedented. <strong>Palisades<\/strong> is the furthest along: it operated from 1971 to 2022, when Entergy exited the wholesale power market. Its license ran through 2031. Holtec International bought the plant and began decommissioning, but no step was irreversible. In August, Holtec began loading fuel, one of the final steps before restart. Loading was paused to determine why one fuel assembly had tilted off vertical. Supply contracts call for Palisades to be in service by March 2027. The plant&#8217;s share of the DOE loan is up to $1.5 billion for about 805 MW.<\/p>\n<p>The other two projects have longer timelines. <strong>Crane<\/strong> is targeting 2027, with a $1.6 billion budget and a $1 billion DOE loan. Microsoft has signed a 20-year agreement tied to the restart. The path depends on FERC and NRC approvals, including a request to transfer capacity rights from Eddystone to avoid a lengthy grid interconnection queue.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Duane Arnold<\/strong> is owned by NextEra Energy. The reactor entered service in 1975 and was due to shut down in October 2020. NextEra and Google are working toward a restart by early 2029. CEO John Ketchum says engineers found the plant in good condition and are confident it can be returned to service. With a long-term contract with a major cloud operator, he explains, no costs fall on Iowa&#8217;s residential customers.<\/p>\n<p>The driver is demand. Electricity consumption is rising, partly because of data centers, and all three plants were already connected to the grid. An analyst cited by AP notes they can be brought back into production relatively quickly compared with other options. Tech companies are looking for clean, round-the-clock power. The Trump administration is pushing nuclear for artificial intelligence and manufacturing. The three plants closed before their licenses expired, mainly because the electricity they produced was judged too expensive. The contracts with Microsoft and Google change that calculation.<\/p>\n<p>The 2.25 GW remains a small share of the demand expected from data centers. If Palisades meets its March 2027 deadline, it will become the operational template for other idled plants, and reactor restarts could become an industrial specialty in their own right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The US Department of Energy is providing up to $4.4 billion in loans to restart Palisades, Crane and Duane Arnold, totaling 2.25 GW. No commercial reactor has ever returned to power generation after decommissioning began.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":3958,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>DOE Lends Up to $4.4 Billion to Restart Three Shuttered Nuclear Plants - Energia nucleare<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"US restarts Palisades, Crane and Duane Arnold with $4.4B in DOE loans: 2.25 GW for data centers and rising power demand.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/energianucleare.eu\/en\/doe-lends-up-to-4-4-billion-to-restart-three-shuttered-nuclear-plants\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"DOE Lends Up to $4.4 Billion to Restart Three Shuttered Nuclear Plants - 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