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The Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing announced this morning that it closed a loan of up to $1.9 billion to NextEra Energy to help finance the restart of the nuclear power plant. Duane Arnold, which first opened in February 1975, closed in 2020 after one of its major customers ended its power purchase agreement. It had been licensed to operate until 2034. NextEra first explored reopening the power plant early last year, saying it hoped to restore the facility’s operating license as early as the end of 2028. The Trump administration said the reopening of the power plant will add 615 megawatts of power back on the grid, roughly enough to power nearly 500,000 homes. This is the third decommissioned nuclear power plant in the U.S. that the Trump administration has agreed to provide funding for, the first two being the Palisades Nuclear Power Plant and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, which has since been renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center. The administration finalized a $1 billion conditional loan commitment for Three Mile Island in November. Constellation Energy and Microsoft aim to bring the plant back online as early as next year. The loan for the Palisades facility was finalized under the Biden administration, though Trump’s Department of Energy has continued to issue funds over the last year and a half. Why it matters: The Trump administration is taking every avenue possible to bolster the domestic nuclear energy industry and secure enough baseload power to aid the race for artificial intelligence.In addition to restarting shuttered nuclear power plants, the Trump administration is financing the construction of advanced nuclear reactors, as well as traditional large reactors. In June, the administration said it would be issuing $17.5 billion in loans to support the development of 10 new large reactors, with the hope that they would be under construction by the end of the decade and operational by the mid-2030s.
