Palisades Nuclear Generating Station

• 1. Introduction

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  Palisades Nuclear Generating Station sits on a 432-acre plot along the Lake Michigan shoreline, five miles south of South Haven, Michigan. For nearly five decades it powered homes and businesses across the region. Then, in May 2022, it went quiet. What followed was something no American nuclear plant had ever done before.

  The plant's single reactor weighs 425 tons. Its containment building stands 189 feet tall, including the dome. The dome roof alone is three feet thick. These are the dimensions of a machine built to last. So how did a facility of this scale end up at the center of a years-long argument over whether to close it, who would buy it, and whether it could ever run again?

  The answers involve a power purchase agreement that turned into a financial trap, a federal loan of one and a half billion dollars, and a decommissioning company that changed its mind. By August 2025, Palisades had done what no other American nuclear plant had managed: it came back online.

• 2. Built to Last

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  Construction on Palisades began in 1967 and wrapped up in 1970. The plant was approved to operate at full power in 1973. Its reactor is a Combustion Engineering pressurized water design. The turbine generator, made by Westinghouse Electric Company, can produce 725,000 kilowatts of electricity.

  The containment building's concrete walls are lined with steel plate. The dome above sits three feet thick. Getting in and out of the containment area requires passing through a personnel lock. These features were not incidental. They represent the engineering philosophy of the era: build for permanence, build for safety.

  The original operating license was set to expire on the 24th of March 2011. In 2005, an application for a 20-year extension was filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. That extension was granted on the 18th of January 2007, pushing the plant's scheduled decommissioning out to 2031. But the future would not wait that long.

• 3. Sale and Ownership

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  Before Entergy entered the picture, Palisades was owned by CMS Energy and operated by the Nuclear Management Company. On the 12th of July 2006, it was announced the plant would change hands. The sale to Entergy closed on the 11th of April 2007, at a price of $380 million.

  That transaction seemed routine at the time. What was not routine was the power purchase agreement that came with it. Consumers Energy was locked into buying electricity from the plant, and when it wanted out of that arrangement, it asked the Michigan Public Service Commission to approve a payment of $172 million to exit the contract early.

  The commission refused to approve the full amount. That refusal had a direct consequence: Entergy chose to keep Palisades running three years longer than it had originally planned. A regulator's decision, not engineering or safety, extended the plant's life by three years.

• 4. The May 2022 Shutdown

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  Entergy had first signaled its intention to close Palisades in October 2018. The plant was originally set to run through the 31st of May 2022. But a faulty control rod drive seal forced operators to pull the plant offline on the 20th of May, eleven days early.

  Just weeks before the shutdown, on the 20th of April 2022, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer requested federal funding to keep the facility open. That request did not stop the closure. Entergy shut Palisades in May 2022, and the sale to Holtec International was completed the following month, in June 2022.

  The plant's electricity generation record over its final full year of operation, 2021, reached just over seven million megawatt-hours. In 2022, production fell to roughly 2.7 million megawatt-hours as the plant wound down before May. The 21 dry cask storage units sitting outdoors on a concrete pad, each holding 30 tons of spent fuel, would outlast the plant's active life by decades.

• 5. Holtec and the Restart Bid

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  Holtec International, based in Jupiter, Florida, acquired the 800-megawatt plant in 2022 with the stated purpose of decommissioning it. The plan called for three years of moving fuel into dry cask storage, followed by a ten-year pause to let the decommissioning trust fund grow, and then a six-year dismantling process with an estimated completion date of 2041. A $550-million trust fund, paid for by Consumers Energy customers, was meant to cover the cost.

  Holtec then reversed course. In September 2022, it applied for funds from the Civil Nuclear Credit program to reopen the plant. That application was denied in November 2022. In December 2022, Holtec announced it would reapply. By January 2024, the federal government was prepared to offer a $1.5 billion loan to fund the restart.

  The conditional loan agreement was announced on the 27th of March 2024. On the 12th of September 2023, Holtec and Wolverine Power Cooperative announced a power purchase agreement under which Wolverine would buy as much as two-thirds of the plant's output, starting as soon as late 2025. Michigan also committed $300 million in state funding to support the restart. If operations resumed, Palisades would become the first U.S. nuclear reactor to restart after its fuel had been removed and its license revised to prohibit further operation.

• 6. A Historic Return

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  On the 27th of August 2025, Palisades changed its status from decommissioned to operational. That single administrative change carried an outsized meaning: no American nuclear plant had accomplished this before. The move allowed the plant to receive nuclear fuel and begin the process of generating electricity again.

  By the 21st of October 2025, Palisades had taken delivery of 68 nuclear fuel assemblies. That same day, a worker at the plant fell into the reactor cavity and had to be decontaminated. The incident was a reminder that even a historic comeback operates under the same physical realities as any working nuclear facility.

  Looking further ahead, in December 2023 Holtec International announced plans to build the first two of its SMR-300 small modular reactors at the Palisades site by mid-2030, adding a second chapter to a facility that was, not long ago, considered finished.