← Videos · Energy & Permitting

Secretary Wright Says the Palisades Nuclear Plant Could Reopen by Late 2025 or Early 2026

March 18, 2025 · U.S. Department of Energy · 0:03:51

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

On Fox Business with Elizabeth MacDonald, Energy Secretary Chris Wright was asked about the Trump agenda to lower costs and achieve energy independence, including why the United States gets electricity from Canada in the first place. Wright said the biggest movement is simply to help grow American energy production — the country has enormous resources, but many states have prevented the building of infrastructure and blocked their citizens’ access to low-cost energy — and that the agenda is to get barriers out of the way and let businesses build energy-producing assets, whether oil and gas wells, nuclear plants, geothermal, or solar with storage, so factories locate here, bring jobs and let consumers pay lower prices, as he stated it.

Asked which nuclear plants are getting rebooted, Wright pointed to the Palisades plant in southwestern Michigan, which he said opened in the early 1970s and ran beautifully for 50 years before being shut down under the energy-transition agenda; he said it is a gigawatt or so of already-built power production capacity, that the Energy Department is giving loan guarantees at ultimately no cost to taxpayers as a nudge, and that the hope is it will be open by late this year or early next year, as he stated it.

On the Keystone pipeline, Wright said it was shamelessly canceled when Biden came in, that the Canadian company lost a billion dollars starting to build it, and that Canada instead built another pipeline to its West Coast to export that oil to China instead of the United States — a huge policy loss, as he characterized it. He said the Trump administration will see a lot of pipelines built, and that just a little infrastructure connecting Marcellus gas in Pennsylvania into New England would save families thousands of dollars a year and bring more high-paying jobs, according to his remarks.

Scoreboard watch

Wright said the administration hopes the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan will reopen by late 2025 or early 2026 with Energy Department loan guarantees — a dated expectation stated on the record in this interview.

Why it matters

The interview dates the Palisades restart expectation — open by late 2025 or early 2026, as Wright stated it — and pairs it with the administration’s pipeline case for New England, two checkable infrastructure claims from the Energy secretary’s second month.

Sources: U.S. Department of Energy, “Secretary Wright joins Fox Business’s Elizabeth MacDonald - March 17th, 2025”, 2025-03-18 (official upload, embedded above; published 2025-03-18). Transcript via Supadata (private research store, paraphrased and attributed, not republished). All figures and characterizations as stated by the speakers.