Michigan Plotting to Re-Open Shuttered 1970s Nuclear Plant
Calling Homer Simpson! Power Hour After shutting it down in 2022, Michigan is making an abrupt u-turn and is now planning to reopen an old 1970s nuclear power, according to The Wall Street Journal. When it starts operating again in about a year, the Palisades plant would become the first decommissioned nuclear power plant in the world that would go back online, the WSJ reports, a feat that bucks the trend in old nuclear power plants going permanently dark, such as in Germany. And there’s serious money behind this: the federal government and the state are pouring $2 billion into the plant’s refurbishment and reopening, a move that seeks to address AI data centers’ hunger for ever more electricity, according to the WSJ‘s reporting. Coupled with this is the federal government’s push for nuclear power as a green, sustainable energy source, which goes against lingering public distrust and fear of nuclear power due to the Chernobyl disaster, the Three Mile Island accident in New York, and most recently the meltdown of the Japanese Fukushima nuclear …
