The Energy Department closed a loan of up to $1.9 billion to NextEra Energy on Tuesday to finance the restart of the Duane Arnold Energy Center, a 615 megawatt reactor in Linn County, Iowa, that has been offline since 2020.
The money comes from the department's Office of Energy Dominance Financing, which announced the deal as a combined conditional commitment and financial close, Engineering News Record reported. NextEra is targeting a restart no later than the first quarter of 2029. The company still needs licensing approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission before the plant can rejoin the grid, and no final timeline has been set pending those reviews.
Google is the reason the economics work. The company agreed in October 2025 to buy the plant's entire output under a 25 year power purchase agreement supplying its cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure in Iowa, TechCrunch reported. NextEra has said the agreement enables the investment needed to restart the plant and covers the cost of producing the energy. Google wrote at the time that it expects Duane Arnold back online in early 2029, delivering more than 600 megawatts of always on power to the regional grid.
Duane Arnold is Iowa's only nuclear facility and ran for more than 45 years. A derecho on Aug. 10, 2020, with gusts reaching 140 mph, damaged the cooling towers and forced the plant offline several months ahead of a retirement that had already been scheduled because of cost pressures, Engadget reported.
DOE said the restart will return enough baseload power to supply nearly 500,000 homes in Iowa and across the region, create close to 1,500 jobs during construction and support more than 450 jobs once the plant is operating. NextEra cited a study projecting more than $9 billion in economic benefits for Iowa over 25 years and roughly $75 million in tax revenue. A separate October 2025 analysis based on the company's cost estimates projected at least $1 billion in direct construction investment.
John Ketchum, NextEra's chairman, president and chief executive, said the project is about delivering new power to meet new demand while generating economic value for Iowans, and that bringing new generation online for new customers is how the country can keep electricity affordable for existing ones.
The financing is the second federal loan of its kind. DOE previously extended $1 billion to Constellation Energy to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, TechCrunch reported. The department said its loan program has now backed three separate nuclear restarts under the current administration.
Three shuttered American reactors are now being revived at once, each of them pulled back into service by electricity demand from data centers. The pattern has forced trade offs. Google has also signed an agreement with a natural gas plant to supply one of its data centers in Texas as its computing load has grown.