Trump administration loans $1.9B to restart NextEra Energy’s Iowa nuclear plant

Iowa’s only nuclear power plant has been dark since August 2020. The Trump administration just decided it shouldn’t stay that way. The Department of Energy closed a loan agreement of up to $1.9 billion with NextEra Energy on September 8, 2026, to fund the restart of the Duane Arnold Energy Center near Palo, Iowa. The plant ran for 45 years before shutting down, and if everything goes to plan, it will be producing electricity again by early 2029. Why a retired reactor is suddenly worth nearly $2 billion Duane Arnold is a 615-megawatt facility, enough output to power roughly 500,000 homes. That kind of reliable, around-the-clock baseload power is exactly what the energy grid is increasingly short on, particularly as AI data centers drive electricity demand to levels the grid was not designed to handle. NextEra has already lined up a buyer for most of that power. The company signed a 25-year Power Purchase Agreement with Google, primarily to supply its AI data centers. About 50 megawatts of the plant’s output is reserved for local customers, with Google taking the rest under a long-term contract that locks in revenue across a quarter-century horizon. The federal bet on nuclear baseloa...