The Department of Energy closed a loan of up to $1.9 billion to bring Iowa's Duane Arnold Energy Center back online, the third mothballed nuclear plant now set for a federally backed restart as data-center demand reshapes the energy map.
NextEra Energy, the plant's owner, received the commitment from the Trump administration's DOE in early September 2026, a move officials described as "the last piece needed to restart the plant." The 615-megawatt boiling-water reactor in Iowa ran for 45 years before shutting down in 2020 after storm damage and the loss of power purchase agreements. Under the new federal backing, Just the News reported, the Duane Arnold restart is expected to be complete no later than the first quarter of 2029.
The loan makes Duane Arnold the third shuttered nuclear facility to receive federal funding commitments under the current administration. It follows a $1 billion DOE loan in November 2025 for the Crane Clean Energy Center, the former Three Mile Island Unit 1 in Pennsylvania, and a $1.52 billion loan guarantee the Biden administration finalized in September 2024 for the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan. Together, the three restart efforts represent more than $4.4 billion in federal lending aimed at bringing offline nuclear capacity back into service.
The force behind this revival is not abstract policy preference. It is electricity. Google partnered with NextEra to purchase power from the restarted Duane Arnold plant for its data centers. Microsoft signed a 20-year power purchase agreement for electricity from the Crane Clean Energy Center restart, also to feed data-center operations. The Washington Examiner noted that the nuclear push is partly driven by the need to secure baseload power to fuel the artificial-intelligence industry race.
The economics are straightforward. Data centers require massive, constant electricity, the kind that wind and solar cannot reliably deliver around the clock. Nuclear plants create power continuously, regardless of weather, and the existing infrastructure at shuttered sites cuts the cost and timeline of building from scratch. The electricity demands of data centers, in other words, changed the economic calculations that had previously made these restarts look unworkable.
For years, the conventional wisdom held that nuclear was finished in America. Three Mile Island's partial meltdown in 1979, the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, and the Fukushima accident in 2011 eroded public confidence in nuclear power. Only three commercial reactors have gone into service in the last 30 years, two new units at the Alvin W. Vogtle plant in Georgia, which came online in 2023 and 2024. The industry stalled while politicians chased wind turbines and solar panels.
Now the market is dragging nuclear back. And the public is following. A national nuclear energy public opinion survey released in May 2026 found that 77 percent of respondents favor nuclear energy, a record high. In 1983, that number was 49 percent. A Gallup poll published earlier found that support for emphasizing nuclear energy had increased, while support for natural gas, wind, and solar had declined. A 2025 Pew Research Center poll also found growing support for nuclear power.
President Trump has signed four executive orders aimed at expanding the nuclear sector: supporting development of advanced nuclear reactors, reforming nuclear reactor testing, reinvigorating domestic fuel production, and reforming the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The specific order names were not included in the announcement, but the scope is notable, the administration is not simply lending money to old plants but attempting to clear regulatory obstacles that have kept new nuclear development frozen for decades.
The Palisades restart in Michigan is the furthest along. Holtec Nuclear Corporation began seeking licensing approvals to revive the 805-megawatt plant in late 2023, roughly a year and a half after it shut down in May 2022. Holtec began loading nuclear fuel into the reactor vessel in August 2026. The company has not announced a firm date for the plant to resume generating power; additional testing, inspections, and Nuclear Regulatory Commission approvals must still be completed.
In Pennsylvania, the Crane Clean Energy Center, a name that quietly scrubs the Three Mile Island association, is expected to come online in 2027, backed by the $1 billion DOE loan and Microsoft's two-decade purchase commitment. The combination of federal financing and long-term corporate contracts gives these projects a financial foundation that earlier restart proposals lacked. Senate Democrats have blocked major spending legislation on other fronts, but the nuclear loans have moved forward through executive-branch authority without requiring a floor vote.
Not everyone is celebrating. The Sierra Club launched a campaign specifically targeting the Duane Arnold restart, arguing that it "comes with safety risks, the reactor is outdated, and the wind and solar are cheaper." The environmental group has also opposed the Palisades and Three Mile Island restarts.
In Michigan, unnamed environmental groups filed a lawsuit in state court to stop the Palisades revival. The suit was dismissed. The groups appealed at the federal level, where the case remains unresolved. But Holtec is already loading fuel, and the DOE money is committed. The legal challenges have not stopped the physical work from proceeding.
The Sierra Club's argument that wind and solar are cheaper deserves scrutiny. Cheaper per kilowatt-hour in ideal conditions, perhaps, but data centers do not run on ideal conditions. They run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and they need power that does the same. Google and Microsoft are not spending billions on nuclear purchase agreements out of nostalgia. They are doing it because intermittent renewables cannot meet their operational requirements. When critics have tried to mock the administration's energy moves, the market's own behavior has been the most effective rebuttal.
Nuclear energy's share of total U.S. electricity generation grew from 2.4 percent in 1971 to 20.1 percent in 1992. It has hovered around 20 percent ever since, a remarkable plateau that reflects both the industry's reliability and its inability to expand under hostile regulatory conditions. The three restart projects will not dramatically change that number on their own, but they represent something that has not happened in the American nuclear sector in a generation: forward motion.
The broader announcement from the administration also referenced support for new nuclear power plants and advanced reactor technology, though specific details beyond the three restarts were not disclosed. Trump has pressured Congress on other legislative priorities with mixed results, but on nuclear energy, the executive branch has moved decisively through its own lending authority.
Several questions remain unanswered. The federal appeal challenging the Palisades restart is still pending. The Duane Arnold loan is described as "up to" $1.9 billion, leaving the final figure uncertain. And no firm timeline exists for when Palisades will actually resume generating electricity, despite fuel loading already underway. Congress has adjourned without acting on major pieces of the administration's domestic agenda, but the nuclear restart effort has not waited for Capitol Hill.
For decades, America's energy establishment treated nuclear power as a relic, too expensive, too scary, too politically toxic. It took Silicon Valley's insatiable demand for electricity to prove what common sense should have made obvious: you cannot power the future with energy sources that depend on the weather.