Nuclear plants once considered finished may be coming back. The United States is ...

The United States is attempting to restart three facilities that had already entered the decommissioning process: Palisades in Michigan, Crane Clean Energy Center at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island site, and Duane Arnold in Iowa.

Together, the plants could restore approximately 2.25 gigawatts of generating capacity—enough electricity for roughly two million homes and businesses.

The Department of Energy is supporting the projects with up to $4.4 billion in federal loans. Two plants also have long-term agreements connected to major technology companies: Microsoft at Crane and Google at Duane Arnold.

Rising electricity demand from AI data centers is one reason previously uneconomic reactors are receiving another look. Supporters argue that restarting existing plants could be faster and less expensive than building equivalent nuclear capacity from scratch.

But these are proposed restarts, not completed ones. Each facility must undergo extensive inspections, refurbishment and regulatory review. Palisades, currently the most advanced of the three projects, is targeting a restart in 2027.

No commercial US reactor is known to have resumed generating electricity after formally entering decommissioning, meaning success would establish a significant precedent.

Should safely restorable nuclear plants receive a second life as electricity demand rises?

Place the data centers and n the nuclear properties away from residential and commercial areas. Then be sure to tax the data center owners for disposal of the nuclear reactors waste. That’s a big one.

It's a really funny coincidence that we have a war in Europe and the Middle East, plus a sudden building boom of data centers, that no one has asked for. It's almost like someone wants high energy prices on purpose.

The issues going on with the Palisades restart and tilted fuel assembly have the community quite concerned, local news published an article stating employees are scared to come forward with safety concerns as well. Could you cover this please?

"Most relevant" is selected, so some may have been filtered out.