Palisades Nuclear Power Plant restart remains in final phases

COVERT — The Palisades Nuclear Power Plant, which is striving to be the first power plant in the United States to be restarted after the decommissioning process had begun, has faced some delays in repowering.

Holtec announced in September of 2024 that it planned to restart operations of the plant by October of 2025. However, that deadline has since come and gone and the plant has yet to be restarted.

“The restart is very much well underway,” Senior Manager of Government Affairs and Communications Nick Culp said. “We’re continuing to work through a very robust restart schedule and, as we said from the beginning, we will be bringing Palisades back online once all of our work is completed and we meet all federal and industry standards for safety and plant reliability.”

Culp said they are continuing to work to restart the plant, but have not targeted a restart date.

“We do not have a publicly stated date,” Culp said. “We do have, obviously, an internal schedule that we have been following, but the thing that we want to stress publicly … the most important thing is making sure that all of our work is done, that all federal approvals are received, and that all federal safety and industry reliability standards are met. So that, ultimately, is the major drive.”

By early fall of 2025, Holtec received reauthorization of power operations from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which formally transitioned Palisades from being a decommissioning status plant to an operation status plant.

“With that, we have been able to receive new fuel, which came to the site and arrived in October and was inspected,” Culp said. “Those fuel assemblies were received, inspected on site and then placed into storage, and our spent fuel pool, while they were waiting and loading into the reactor.”

Culp said they also completed the process of sleaving the generators during the summer of 2025.

“After that, we decided to do a deep cleaning of the equipment to ensure long-term equipment reliability,” Culp said. “Basically preparing them not just to restart, but to be ready to run for decades to come and that’s a lot of the work that we’re trying to tie up right now, too.”

Even though there is no set deadline, Culps said they are in the final phases of the restart.

“We recently moved over the reactor vessel head, which we completed scheduled maintenance activities on. It’s a 215,000-pound component head itself,” Culp said. “So, moving that over, synchronized and doing it safely was an important step.”

One of the steps they are currently working on is resealing the primary system.

“We are in the process of resealing what we call the primary system and we’re about to go through system passivation, which is a process of putting in a passive, protective coating inside of all the equipment on the primary side or the nuclear side of the plant,” Culp said. “Once that’s complete, we will then be in a position to prepare to start loading new fuel.”

Another big step the plant is working on is completing maintenance and inspection activities throughout the plant to make sure it’s ready to go back into service.

“It’s not just about getting Palisades resynced to the grid and generating electric; it’s about making sure we’re doing those long-term investments now while we still have the benefit of the plant being offline and taking advantage of that time that we currently have,” Culp said.

He said the plant being offline gives them a unique opportunity to do more work that they typically wouldn’t be able to do with it being online.

“The work that we’re doing now is not your standard, 30-day, refueling maintenance outage, which is what we do typically when we’re in operation,” Culp said. “We’re at a very unique point where no other plant has been before, where we can and we have taken the time to do things that, one, would not be practical to do when the plant’s online, because typically when you go into an outage, you try to get the plant back online after 30 days. We’re not in that position right now, so we have taken advantage of the time to do investments, to do cleaning and repair activities and upgrades that normally we would not get to, if you were in a crunched 30-day period.”

A historic plan

The Palisades plant, which was formerly owned by Entergy, shut down in May of 2022. In June of that same year, Holtec acquired the plant with plans to decommission it.

In the fall of 2022, the U.S. Department of Energy rejected Holtec’s initial bid to restart the plant, but the company, with support from the state of Michigan, continued its efforts.

The NRC created the Palisades Restart Panel in 2023 to guide the efforts to review, inspect and determine whether the plant could safely be returned to operation.

In September of 2024, the DOE announced the closing of a loan guarantee for up to $1.52 billion to help finance the restart of the nuclear plant. In addition, the state has given $300 million in grants to the plant for the restart.

“We’re trying to make good use of this rare opportunity that plants never get and this is the first time something like this has ever happened in the United States,” Culp said. “We were very excited for the day when Palisades is back online, generating electricity, but we’re going to make sure that, before we get to that date, that all of our work has been completed and that we’re taking advantage of this opportunity.”

Along with the restart, Holtec is also working to deploy two next generation small modular reactors to boost the generation capacity at the plant.

In December of 2025, the DOE awarded a $400 million grant to Holtec for the small modular reactors project.

“That money is going to go toward early procurement of major components that will be needed for the manufacturing of those SMRs here in the United States,” Culp said.

Culp said they also submitted part one of the construction permit application for the reactors in December to the NRC for approval.

“Assuming that regulatory review is successful, we will be submitting our phase two application,” Culp said. “We’re also doing site prep work right now. We’ve done a little bit of clearing in anticipation of those SMRs being constructed at the site.”

Along with the preconstruction activities, Culp said they have been doing a lot of environmental work and have a goal to get the two new reactors online by early next decade.

“We are hopeful that they will be the first two small modular reactors in the United States,” Culp said. “The two units would add 240 megawatts each, which combined would be 680 megawatts, that would nearly double the site’s electrical output.”