NextEra Gets $1.9B DOE Loan to Restart Iowa Nuclear Plant
DOE closed a loan of up to $1.9B for NextEra to restart the 615 MW Duane Arnold nuclear plant in Iowa, underwritten by a Google power deal.
The Department of Energy closed a loan of up to $1.9 billion to NextEra Energy to restart the Duane Arnold Energy Center, a 615 megawatt nuclear plant in Linn County, Iowa, that has sat idle since a 2020 derecho knocked out its cooling towers. The loan came through the department’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing, and NextEra is targeting a return to service around late 2028 or early 2029, pending U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing approval.
Why it matters
For developers scouting data center sites, this is the clearest signal yet that power, not land or entitlements, decides where the next campus gets built. Duane Arnold sat shuttered for five years because there was no buyer for its output. It is restarting now because NextEra signed a 25-year power purchase agreement with Google in October 2025 to feed Iowa data centers directly. That is the underwriting logic developers now have to plan around: retired baseload capacity is coming back online specifically to be pre-sold to hyperscalers, which means the power is spoken for before a site plan is drawn. Markets with retired or underused generation and a utility willing to cut this kind of deal move up the list. Markets without it stay stuck in interconnection queues. For construction firms, DOE Deputy Secretary James Danly said the project supports thousands of jobs, a restart rather than new-build profile that favors crews with plant refurbishment experience over ground-up nuclear construction.
The numbers
The DOE loan is up to $1.9 billion, the department’s third nuclear restart financing under the current administration. Duane Arnold has 615 megawatts of capacity, according to the NRC. DOE says the restart will support nearly 1,500 construction jobs and more than 450 permanent positions once operating, generating enough electricity for roughly 500,000 homes. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission separately approved a waiver in August 2025 allowing the restart by the end of 2029. DOE did not disclose the loan’s interest rate, tenor, or the total project cost.
What’s next
NextEra still needs NRC to sign off on license amendments before Duane Arnold can produce power again; the agency has set up a dedicated Restart Panel to oversee inspections and licensing. If the plant clears that process on schedule, it becomes a template other utilities can point to: pair a retired reactor with a hyperscaler PPA and a federal loan, and power that was stranded becomes a data center’s reason to locate there. Follow ongoing coverage in data centers and national markets.