Palisades Nuclear Plant Restart Slips Again as Holtec Drops Its October 2025 Target

Holtec International says the hard part is finished at Palisades. Reactor vessel inspections, steam generator tube refurbishment, primary system decontamination, and operator training are all wrapped up, according to the company's announcement. New fuel is sitting on site, ready to load.

What Holtec still won't give anyone is a restart date.

In 2025, Patrick O'Brien, Holtec's International Director of Government Affairs and Communications, told Utility Dive that the company "remains on track to restart operations at Palisades in October 2025." October 2025 came and went. No restart.

Since early this year, Holtec's public language has shifted to something far less pinned down: the plant will restart "when the plant is ready for long-term operations." CEO Kris Singh told the Financial Times he still expects Palisades back online sometime in 2026, ahead of a March 2027 power supply contract deadline. But 2026 is now half over, and there's still no firm date attached to that expectation.

The timeline has been sliding for a while. When the Department of Energy closed a $1.5 billion loan for the project in 2024, the working assumption was a late-2025 restart. As that deadline approached and passed into early 2026, steam generator problems pushed the target into the middle of 2026. Now even that softer target has dissolved into phrases like "steady progress" and "when ready." Holtec says more than 5,000 individual work activities remain on the checklist, most of them described as routine maintenance, testing, inspection, and operational readiness items rather than major fixes.

On the legal side, Holtec got a win. A federal court dismissed a lawsuit from environmental groups that had challenged the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's exemption allowing a plant that had already gone through decommissioning to restart. The groups' underlying concern was straightforward: Palisades wasn't just idle, it was formally in the decommissioning process, and they argued the NRC's exemption let the plant skip scrutiny that a normal restart or new-build license would require. The court's dismissal doesn't settle whether that concern was legitimate, only that this particular legal challenge didn't succeed.

Meanwhile, Holtec is moving forward on other fronts. The company is preparing an IPO that multiple outlets have valued at roughly $10 billion. That's a company betting big on its nuclear portfolio even as its flagship restart project keeps missing its own targets.

Palisades was supposed to be the easy one. It's an existing plant on an existing site, with a recently active operating license framework, and it was the first project to land a major DOE loan guarantee for a nuclear restart. If the simplest project on the table keeps blowing through deadlines, that's worth watching for what it says about every other advanced nuclear or restart project lining up behind it for federal support.

The $1.5 billion DOE loan is taxpayer money. Every missed deadline is a data point on whether that loan was priced and timed realistically, or whether the department signed off on assumptions that didn't hold up once crews got into the steam generators and reactor internals. Neither the DOE nor Holtec has published an updated, binding restart date. Until one shows up, "this year" is doing a lot of work as a placeholder, and the March 2027 power supply contract is the real deadline that will force the issue one way or another.