The Palisades nuclear power plant on the shore of Lake Michigan in 2017, five years before it closed. If the Nuclear Regulatory Commission gives its approval, the plant will soon be restarted by Holtec International.
Photographer: Jim West/AlamyThe Company Preaching America’s Nuclear Revival
Holtec got its start making storage casks for radioactive waste. Now it wants to power the next generation of US nuclear reactors—and it’s shutting down the old ones along the way.
In 2016 the utility company Entergy Corp. announced plans to close one of its nuclear power plants. Palisades, a facility in Michigan that supplied about 6% of the state’s energy, was no longer cost-effective, with natural gas and renewables becoming cheaper. When the plant finally shuttered in May 2022, it looked as if it would be the very last of a series of reactors going dark as America’s grid turned away from fission.
But then the opposite happened. Even before Palisades officially closed, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, had called for the lights to stay on. “I intend to do everything I can to keep this plant open, protect jobs, and expand clean energy production,” she wrote to US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm in April 2022. Whitmer kept her promise: This year, on March 27, the Department of Energy approved a $1.5 billion loan for Palisades to be restarted, conditional on its new owner satisfying a number of confidential requirements. By 2025, if all goes according to plan, the state will once again be running—in part—on the plant’s 800-megawatt reactor, which sits on the shores of Lake Michigan about two hours northeast of Chicago.