Two dead reactors are coming back online on $2.52 billion in federal loans

No commercial nuclear reactor has ever gone from decommissioning back to full power in the United States.▸ Two are attempting it at once. Palisades, on Lake Michigan, and the Crane Clean Energy Center — formerly Three Mile Island Unit 1, on the Susquehanna River — both shut down for good, both began the legal process of permanent closure, and both are now being rebuilt on federal loan guarantees before a single one has finished. The money for the restart and the money set aside to bury the plant are, on paper, two different accounts. In practice, regulators are still sorting out how cleanly that line has held.

Both restarts run on the same federal instrument — a Department of Energy loan guarantee — issued under two different programs eighteen months apart.

Holtec International's Palisades project closed a $1.52 billion loan guarantee in September 2024, the first issued under DOE's Title 17 Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment authority — the 800-megawatt plant had been shut since May 2022 and was partway through decommissioning when Holtec applied to reverse course.▸ Constellation Energy's Crane Clean Energy Center, the 835-megawatt reactor known for 45 years as Three Mile Island Unit 1, closed a $1.0 billion loan in November 2025 under DOE's newer Energy Dominance Financing Program — the first time the Loan Programs Office finalized a conditional commitment and financial close simultaneously, DOE says, on the strength of Constellation's balance sheet. Neither reactor had generated a watt of power in years. Both are now backed, combined, by $2.52 billion in federal credit.

Every reactor operator is required to fund a decommissioning trust fund (DTF) — ratepayer and interest money set aside for exactly one purpose: tearing the plant down.▸ Palisades' DTF is the one under scrutiny. In a Director's Decision issued August 14, 2025 resolving a petition from three environmental groups, the NRC laid out exactly what Holtec had logged against the fund while simultaneously working to restart the plant it was supposed to be dismantling.

Holtec's own reporting to the NRC showed $143 million in decommissioning-related expenses for 2022 and 2023 combined — but only $23 million had actually been withdrawn from the trust fund by the end of 2023.▸ The remaining $120 million sat as a claim against the fund that Holtec plans to collect later, $60 million in each of 2040 and 2041 — decades after the restart it is now pursuing. Separately, NRC inspections covering the same period found that just over $57,000 of the fund's spending paid for activities that did not qualify as decommissioning under federal regulation — community donations and billing-code errors, the NRC concluded, not a scheme. Holtec reimbursed the money and the agency closed the matter with a Severity Level IV noncited violation, its lowest enforcement tier. Constellation, for its part, has drawn a harder line at Crane: it told regulators it has not and will not tap the Crane DTF to pay for the restart, and in July 2025 asked the NRC to rescind two standing exemptions that would have let it do so without prior notice.

Money aside, both projects are pitched on the same currency: a workforce that a decommissioning schedule was set to shrink to a skeleton crew, now being rebuilt back toward full operating strength.

Palisades is projected to support up to 600 high-quality jobs in Michigan, many held by workers with 20-plus years at the site, at an average salary of $117,845 — with more than 1,000 additional jobs during refueling outages every 18 months.▸ At Crane, Constellation set a hiring target of more than 600 full-time employees before restart, on top of hundreds of contractors drawn mostly from local union halls; DOE's own loan announcement credits the project with over 600 American jobs. The single hardest constraint at both sites has been the same: new control room operators need an NRC license to run the reactor, and that pipeline — not steel, not the loan — is what is setting the restart date.

Loan figures are the guaranteed amounts at financial close, not funds disbursed to date, which rise with each DOE-approved disbursement. DTF figures cover Holtec's 2022–2023 reporting period only, as reviewed in the NRC's August 2025 Director's Decision; more recent Palisades DTF activity is not covered here. Job figures are project-level estimates from DOE, state government, and the utilities themselves, not independently audited payroll counts.