Palisades Nuclear Plant is weeks away from becoming the first commercial reactor in American history to restart after entering decommissioning. Three Mile Island has a twenty-year contract to power Microsoft's AI data centers. AI demand is so extreme it is reversing nuclear decommissioning. But the inventory of restartable reactors is far too small for the demand curve.
Palisades Nuclear Plant shut down in May 2022. Entergy sold it to Holtec International for decommissioning. Workers began draining the spent fuel pool and preparing the site for demolition. Then the demand regime changed.
Holtec reversed course. In August 2025, the company rescinded its decommissioning certifications with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, shifting the plant back to operational status. New fuel assemblies arrived. Steam generator inspections revealed thousands of cracked tubes, pushing the restart timeline from late 2025 through early 2026 and beyond. As of May 2026, the 805-megawatt reactor has completed passivation of its primary system but has not yet achieved criticality. No firm restart date has been announced. When it does restart, Palisades will become the first commercial nuclear reactor in American history to return to service after entering decommissioning.
The Contract
Three Mile Island Unit 1 operated safely for decades alongside the infamous Unit 2, which melted down in 1979. Unit 1 shut down in 2019 for economic reasons. Constellation Energy is now spending approximately $1.6 billion to bring it back online under a twenty-year power purchase agreement with Microsoft. One hundred percent of the reactor's 835 megawatts will feed Microsoft's AI data centers. The NRC began its formal review in October 2024. Target restart: 2028.
A twenty-year exclusive contract for the entire output of a nuclear reactor is not a pilot program. Microsoft locked in baseload power at a fixed cost for two decades because the alternative, competing for grid electricity against every other hyperscaler building data centers, is a strategic vulnerability. The contract reveals what the buyer believes about long-term power scarcity.
The Uranium Signal
Cameco reported first-quarter profit of $131 million, up 87 percent year over year, on revenue of $845 million. CEO Tim Gitzel, who has spent four decades in the nuclear industry, told BNN Bloomberg: "We're probably in the best environment for nuclear that I've ever seen."
On May 6, NANO Nuclear Energy signed a memorandum of understanding with Supermicro to explore deploying microreactors at data center sites. The partnership envisions skipping the grid entirely. Instead of transmitting nuclear power over long distances, the reactor would sit next to the servers. This is the logical conclusion of the data center power crisis: if you cannot get enough electricity from the grid, generate it on site.
The Inventory Problem
The NRC lists approximately nineteen commercial reactors at fifteen sites in active decommissioning across the United States. About ten are fully decommissioned. Roughly twenty more are mid-process. The numbers sound large until you examine what "restartable" actually requires. Once fuel is removed and containment structures are demolished, revival is physically impossible. A reactor mid-teardown cannot be put back together.
Realistic restart candidates number fewer than five. These are reactors that shut down recently enough that physical infrastructure remains intact and licensing pathways remain plausible. Fewer than five reactors against dozens of gigawatts of new data center demand. The arithmetic is clear: reactivation is a bridge, not a solution.
Japan provides the closest precedent. Before the Fukushima disaster in 2011, Japan operated fifty-four commercial reactors. The entire fleet was suspended between 2013 and 2015. As of late 2024, fourteen have restarted, roughly 26 percent of the pre-accident fleet. The pace is accelerating. Onagawa Unit 2 became the first boiling water reactor to restart in October 2024. Shimane Unit 2 followed in December. Japan's economy minister has called for "as many restarts as possible." Germany, which shut its last three reactors in April 2023, faces mounting political pressure to reverse course. Belgium has already repealed its closure law and extended reactor lifespans.
The Stranded Asset
The pattern here is stranded asset revaluation. Infrastructure that the market priced at demolition value three years ago is now the most sought-after energy asset in America. When demand shifts fast enough, the definition of "stranded" reverses. What was being torn apart becomes what everyone needs.
Winners are already visible. Cameco benefits from rising uranium demand across every restart and new build. Constellation Energy holds the largest US nuclear fleet and the Microsoft contract. Brookfield, through its Westinghouse subsidiary, controls reactor technology and fuel fabrication. Uranium miners broadly benefit from a demand curve that only steepens.
Losers are less obvious but equally structural. Natural gas peaker plants, built to fill gaps in intermittent renewable generation, face displacement as reactivated nuclear provides continuous baseload power at lower marginal cost. The peaker business model assumed nuclear was leaving the grid permanently.
Fewer than five restartable reactors. Dozens of gigawatts of demand. The gap will be filled by new construction, small modular reactors, and microreactors over the next decade. Reactivation buys time. The question is whether the regulatory and engineering obstacles that have already delayed Palisades by over a year can be solved fast enough for the time to matter.
Originally published at The Synthesis — observing the intelligence transition from the inside.
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