Palisades Nuclear Plant Could Restart Within Weeks. The NRC Just Found a 'Chilled' Safety Culture Inside It.

On October 29th, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright toured the Palisades nuclear plant on the shore of Lake Michigan in Covert Township, then told reporters the plant could restart within weeks. "It will be started in a few weeks," he said, describing the remaining work as "meticulous" but nearly finished. If he's right, Palisades becomes the first commercial nuclear plant in U.S. history to close, sit cold, and come back online, a milestone the industry has chased for years and keeps almost reaching.

The plant shut down in 2022, when its former owner, Entergy, decided the power it produced no longer made economic sense to sell. Covert Township felt that decision immediately. Plant taxes had made up roughly 40% of the township's entire revenue before the closure, and researchers later put the area's total economic loss, lost tax revenue, lost salaries, lost business at the diners and hardware stores that depended on 600 well-paid jobs, at more than $250 million. Those are the numbers a restart is supposed to reverse: the same roughly 600 jobs, and about $40 million a year in local tax revenue, flowing back in if the plant actually turns back on.

The money behind the comeback

Getting there has taken an unusual amount of public money for a private plant. The federal government finalized a $1.52 billion loan to fund repairs and refueling, on top of roughly $1.3 billion more in other federal support, and Michigan has put in $300 million of its own, with Governor Whitmer pushing to double that. The buyer for the power, once it flows, is Wolverine Power Cooperative, a group of rural electric co-ops that signed on back in September 2023, long before any of this federal and state money showed up. Palisades isn't the only plant getting this treatment. The Department of Energy is backing as much as $4.4 billion combined across Palisades, the Crane Clean Energy Center at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, and the Duane Arnold plant in Iowa, roughly 2.25 gigawatts of generation that federal officials and multiple news outlets have described in nearly identical language: reviving old nuclear plants to meet surging electricity demand, including from data centers.

Not everyone is convinced the timing works. One industry analyst, weighing the restart math against how fast AI data centers are actually being built, put it bluntly: nuclear power "is not a 'now' thing." Microsoft has a 20-year power purchase agreement for Crane's output once it's running, expected as late as 2028, and the plant still needs final NRC approval on top of the environmental review and FERC interconnection waiver it has already secured. NextEra and Google are targeting 2029 for Duane Arnold's restart, a timeline pushed out partly because generator step-up transformers for that plant aren't expected to arrive until 2028. Palisades, if Wright is right, would beat both of those by roughly two years, which is exactly why its last mile matters so much to how credible the rest of the nuclear-restart story is. None of the three plants closed because they were unsafe. All three closed because the power they produced was, at the time, too expensive to sell. AI-driven demand is the reason that math flipped.

What almost derailed it

On August 30th, while workers were lowering a previously used fuel assembly into the reactor vessel, it tipped from its upright position after the fuel-handling machine's grapple disengaged. Holtec, the plant's current owner, paused fuel loading and notified the NRC. The agency's spokesperson was specific about the word choice: the assembly was "tipped," not dropped. No radiation was released, and the other fuel assemblies already in the core weren't affected.

That specificity didn't satisfy everyone. Edwin Lyman, a nuclear safety director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, argued publicly that Holtec had effectively dropped a partially burned fuel assembly and that the company and the NRC stayed silent about it for more than two weeks. Lyman has also argued more broadly that Holtec, other energy companies, and "several Big Tech companies" are running what he called "performative exercises" meant to show that nuclear power can solve the AI industry's power problem quickly. The NRC ultimately approved an emergency, one-time plan letting Holtec remove the tilted assembly with a containment polar crane and a custom fuel-movement device, moving it to the spent fuel pool rather than leaving it in the core.

Then, in October, the NRC made a second, separate finding that got less attention than the fuel incident but may matter more. Following an inspection that began in July and included interviews with more than 120 employees, the agency told Holtec it had identified a "chilled work environment" in two departments at Palisades, supply chain and quality assurance, meaning some workers didn't feel free to raise safety concerns through the normal channels available to them. The NRC was careful to say this didn't amount to a rule violation and wasn't expected to delay the restart on its own. I think that's the sentence worth sitting with longest in this whole story. A nuclear regulator telling a company its own quality-assurance staff are hesitant to speak up, and pairing that finding with "but go ahead and restart anyway," is not actually the reassuring combination it's being treated as.

A date that keeps moving, and what comes after it

Palisades has missed its own restart date enough times that Wright's "few weeks" deserves the same evidentiary skepticism GridPermit applies to any developer's claim about when power will actually show up. Holtec first targeted a restart by the end of 2025. Then February 2026. Then the first half of 2026. The plant did hit one real, verifiable milestone on September 11th, reconnecting to the 345-kilovolt switchyard that will eventually carry its power out onto the grid, and that's a completed, inspectable fact, not a projection. Everything after it, including Wright's timeline, is still a forecast until the NRC formally clears full-power operation and Palisades actually starts generating electricity that Wolverine's co-op members can use.

The stakes of getting this right extend well past one plant. Holtec wants to build two of its own small modular reactors, each 300 megawatts, on the same Covert Township site, with the first targeted for roughly 2030. Michigan's legislature has separate bills moving to award business tax credits for new nuclear development, provisions that would plainly benefit Holtec, and lawmakers are weighing tax breaks meant to draw data centers into the state on the strength of the power Palisades and those future reactors would add to the grid. If Palisades restarts cleanly, every one of those next steps gets easier to finance and easier to permit. If it stumbles again, another tipped assembly, another chilled-environment finding, another slipped date, it becomes the cautionary case that both nuclear skeptics and data center opponents cite for years, in Michigan and everywhere else a shuttered plant is being pitched as the fast answer to AI's power problem.

Watch three things from here: whether the NRC signs off on full-power operation before the calendar runs out on Wright's "few weeks," whether the retrieval of that tilted fuel assembly closes out without incident, and whether Holtec's own supply-chain and quality-assurance staff start showing up in later NRC inspection reports as people who feel safe raising a hand. The jobs and the tax base Covert Township lost in 2022 are real, and worth getting back. So is the plain fact that the agency deciding whether this plant is safe just told its operator, in writing, that some of its own safety staff were afraid to talk.