New Energy World™
New Energy World™ embraces the whole energy industry as it connects and converges to address the decarbonisation challenge. It covers progress being made across the industry, from the dynamics under way to reduce emissions in oil and gas, through improvements to the efficiency of energy conversion and use, to cutting-edge initiatives in renewable and low-carbon technologies.
Repowered: new life for decom nuclear plants in the US
21/1/2026
8 min read
Feature
Like the mythical Phoenix, Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in the US state of Michigan is just days away from achieving an American civil nuclear power first: restarting after having entered decommissioning. It’s no fluke; less than two years behind it will be Pennsylvania’s 835 MWe Three Mile Island (TMI) Unit 1, now called the Crane Clean Energy Center. It is anticipated that Duane Arnold and the Virgil Summer 3 and 4 nuclear stations will soon follow. New Energy World Senior Editor Will Dalrymple MEI reports.
These extraordinary turnarounds are all a result of the AI boom, and its demand for massive data centres, which is fuelling the need for electricity. Hence the current popularity of the low-carbon baseload provided by civil nuclear power plants. The TMI-1 restart is facilitated by a 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with Microsoft; Duane Arnold’s resuscitation is powered by a 25-year PPA with Google.
Palisades and Crane share two other key characteristics, argues Catherine Prat, Project Engineering Lead at an unnamed major nuclear developer, and an American Nuclear Society board member. Both shutdowns, which were within the past decade, were purely economic decisions ‘in a market that has since done a 180° turnaround’, she says, referring to the rapidly changing demand for electricity in recent years.
Prat contrasts these restarts with those from the only other time operating nuclear power plants shut down, a refuelling outage every 18 to 24 months to replace the hundreds of enriched uranium fuel rods that power the reactor. Over those month-long shutdowns, the operator uses the opportunity to carry out a number of inspections and repairs. ‘It’s a completely different thing,’ she remarks.