Google’s revived nuclear power plant gets $1.9B loan from US government

NextEra Energy has received a $1.9 billion loan from the U.S. Department of Energy to support refurbishment of the Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa, a site that has been offline since storm damage in 2020. The company plans to restart the reactor and, according to government officials, bring it back into service in 2029. Google publicly signaled interest in reviving the plant last October and is reportedly evaluating the construction of up to six data centers in the area.

The federal loan is the second of its kind under the current administration; last year the Department of Energy provided a $1 billion loan to Constellation Energy to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island. Officials and industry observers frame these transactions as part of a broader push to supply reliable, low-carbon electricity to high-demand customers in the tech sector. Deputy Secretary of Energy James Danly said the Duane Arnold restart will “drive down electricity costs,” though he did not detail the mechanisms for those savings.

NextEra has said it will reserve 50 megawatts of the plant’s output for a local power cooperative, a quantity the company estimates would have covered roughly 18% of Iowa’s electricity demand growth since 2021. As part of the refurbishment, the facility’s capacity is expected to increase by about 14 megawatts to a total of 615 megawatts. The restart push follows a period when cheap natural gas undercut nuclear’s economics, prompting NextEra to mothball Duane Arnold after the 2020 storm.

The renewed interest in restarting mothballed reactors is driven in part by rapidly rising electricity demand from new AI data centers and other electrification trends; analysts forecast that data center growth could nearly triple the sector’s power needs by 2035. Other recent deals illustrate the trend: Microsoft contracted with Constellation to bring Three Mile Island back online (projected to produce 835 megawatts in 2028), and Meta purchased clean energy attributes from Constellation’s 1.1-gigawatt Clinton plant to offset operations for its Hyperion AI center. Industry reports suggest a small number of additional shuttered U.S. reactors could be feasible candidates for similar restarts, though some, like California’s San Onofre, would require substantially more work to return to service.