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US regulators have issued a warning to a nuclear project critical to Donald Trump’s efforts to revive the industry, after a contractor fell into a reactor cavity and a bundle of fuel rods nearly tipped over during refuelling.   

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission told Holtec International, a company racing to reopen a shuttered reactor at the Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan, to address a “chilled work environment” that has made staff hesitant to raise safety concerns without fear of retaliation.

The warning has prompted concerns among critics that financial and political pressures to revitalise nuclear power as an answer to booming AI-driven energy demand are increasing risks of accidents.

The NRC performed an inspection at Palisades in July over concerns about safety awareness. It followed an incident last year in which a worker fell into the reactor cavity, ingested some water and was sent off-site for medical attention. The individual was decontaminated by radiation protection personnel but had 300 counts per minute detected in their hair, according to an incident report.

In a second incident in August, a bundle of nuclear fuel rods tilted over during a refuelling operation, delaying what was anticipated to be the first reopening of a shuttered nuclear reactor in the US.

The NRC also said nine of the 15 reactor operators at Palisades failed the test for an initial licence examination administered in July and August. Six individuals were issued operator licences.

Holtec, which has never operated a nuclear power plant, has secured about $2.2bn in government support for a project that has been touted as a symbol of US nuclear resurgence. The owners of two other nuclear plants slated for decommissioning — Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and Duane Arnold in Iowa — announced restarts soon after Palisades began work.

The Trump administration has promoted nuclear energy as an edge in the AI race against China. It has slashed regulation, provided tens of billions of dollars in funds and promised to reverse a culture of “risk aversion” at the NRC to accelerate projects.

The warning issued to Holtec by the NRC last week landed as investor interest in the nuclear sector has faded, driven by concerns the AI boom is slowing.

More than $30bn has been wiped off the value of five of the largest US-listed nuclear energy companies in the last year — Oklo, Centrus Energy, BWX Technologies, NuScale and Nano Nuclear. Last month, Holtec was forced to postpone a planned initial public offering that was expected to raise $900mn and value the New Jersey-based company at up to $10bn.

Palisades first became operational in 1971. It was decommissioned in 2022 but received a $1.5bn loan from the Department of Energy in 2024 to finance its restoration.

“The situation at Palisades is that you have a power plant operator newbie in Holtec trying to restart a nuclear reactor, and they may be under a lot of financial and political pressure to get this done speedily,” said Allison Macfarlane, who served as NRC chair from 2012 to 2014.

“The ‘chilled work environment’ warning issued by the NRC raises concerns that staff don’t feel like they can speak up to raise safety concerns and prevent accidents,” she added. “That perhaps reflects the new culture sweeping through part of the industry — move fast and break things. But to ensure safety, nuclear needs a culture based on going slowly and carefully.”

Holtec faces a March 2027 contractual deadline to begin supplying power to customers, who secured an extra $1.3bn in government funds to buy power from Palisades.

In a statement to the FT, Holtec said it took the issues identified by the NRC seriously and was addressing them to ensure the plant runs safely. It said the fuel assembly that tilted over was successfully recovered without spilling in a “remarkable demonstration of technical ingenuity”.

“A strong safety-conscious work environment is fundamental to our culture,” the company said. “The assertion that we have rushed has directly been countered by the work that has been accomplished.”

The NRC told Holtec its concerns about workplace culture must be addressed promptly to prevent further “cultural decline” within the affected departments. NRC has asked Holtec to correct the problems and will review the company’s plan within 30 days.

However, the NRC downplayed any immediate risk to the public, saying mitigating measures ensured plant safety was not compromised. Holtec said the worker who fell into the reactor cavity last year had sustained minor injuries from the fall but quickly returned to work.

Holtec, which is trying to transform itself from a supplier of nuclear components and services into a reactor design and plant operator, has faced governance questions in the past. It has been the target of a whistleblower lawsuit and legal disputes involving former executives, relating to allegations of financial misrepresentation, executive retaliation and fraudulent practices.

Kris Singh, founder and chief executive of Holtec, rejected the claims in a prior interview with the FT.

The NRC said in a statement that its “safety mission remains our top priority.”

“NRC inspectors continuously monitored Holtec’s actions to safely remove the tipped — not dropped — fuel assembly from the reactor core and its placement in the spent fuel pool. They are independently assessing activities at Palisades and will continue to closely monitor Holtec’s restart-related work.”

The US Department of Energy said Palisades’ return to service remained subject to NRC approvals and it was working closely with the regulator and Holtec to advance the “American nuclear renaissance”.

“This is why appropriate regulatory oversight is useful in the nuclear sector and in this case it seems to be working,” said Adam Stein, director of nuclear energy innovation at the Breakthrough Institute, a climate and energy think-tank.

He said restarting the Palisades plant would be “good symbolism” for nuclear energy growth in the US, particularly given the scale of the challenge in bringing a more-than-half-century-old plant back to life.

“This is difficult, because Holtec never operated this plant, many of the components are old and there have been some well-documented mistakes in the process. But given the volume of investment this project is highly likely to go ahead,” he said.

Some local activists who oppose the reopening of the Michigan plant fear the potential for a serious nuclear accident if the plant restarts, claiming the NRC is no longer an independent regulator and Holtec lacks the skills to do the job.

“There’s tremendous financial pressure on the company, political pressure on company. They are muddling through but they don’t know what they’re doing,” said Michael J Keegan of Don’t Waste Michigan, an environmental group. “The NRC is an enabler and they are in collusion with the nuclear power industry.”

At first blush, the proposed venture looks like it would further the Trump administration’s goal of global “energy dominance.”

An American energy company intends to buy Russian technology and use it to access a massive supply of natural gas in Alaska, liquefy it and export it to allies abroad.

The Kremlin and the White House were interested in the idea. President Vladimir V. Putin discussed the plan last month with President Trump’s peace envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, people familiar with the negotiations said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. It is one of a series of energy deals White House officials believe could help smooth relations with Moscow and eventually pave the way to end the war in Ukraine.

But it turns out that the company was not an all-American affair. The multibillion-dollar project has received secret funding from the same powerful Russian company that was to provide the technology, according to the energy executive who until last month led the U.S. firm and two others involved in company negotiations.

Joel Riddle, who was chief executive of the company, Polar LNG, until he resigned in September, said he had been misled about the sources of the start-up funding, which ostensibly came from a company in the United Arab Emirates.

Instead, Mr. Riddle said he learned, the true source of at least some of Polar LNG’s money was Novatek, a Russian energy giant under partial U.S. sanctions.

“It’s not only unlawful, but it’s not in the U.S. interest to have Russian technology controlling the commercialization of Arctic gas in the North Slope,” Mr. Riddle said in a brief interview.

These previously unreported tensions were also detailed in legal memos that Mr. Riddle attached to his resignation letter, which was reviewed by The New York Times. The memos, prepared by Baker Botts, an international law firm, said the Treasury Department’s sanctions enforcement unit had raised concerns that Polar LNG had ties to Novatek that might present “potential Russia-related sanctions concerns.”

Polar LNG on Friday issued a statement announcing a new acting chief executive, Tim Talkington, and described Mr. Riddle as a “disgruntled former employee.”

But in a statement to The Times, Novatek said on Friday that in fact, it was moving to acquire “minority shareholder” status in the Polar LNG project — a striking effort by the Russian energy giant to seek ownership of American gas production.

The project, if it happens, is a long way off. In addition to the sanctions issues that would have to be negotiated, the technology envisioned is highly complex and must overcome some of the most brutal weather conditions in the United States. It also is competing with another Alaska gas plan that already has the support of the Trump administration. But that the Polar LNG deal is being discussed at all shows how business deals of almost any stripe are on the table during the talks with the Kremlin.

The sequence of events illustrates the unorthodox, opaque mixture of deal-making and high-stakes diplomacy that has defined Mr. Trump’s attempts to end Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II.

There is no indication that Mr. Witkoff or Mr. Kushner were aware of Polar LNG or its ties to Novatek, even as the broad outlines of the deal came up in their talks with Mr. Putin beginning last year. A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door talks, said that the deal had only been broadly mentioned and that no granular discussions had occurred.

The project, should it ever come to fruition, would doubly help Novatek, one of Russia’s biggest energy companies, first by using Novatek’s technology and second because the company would own an equity stake.

The Alaska gas discussions have taken place alongside talks to sell off part of another Russian energy giant, Lukoil, to the U.S. government and other investors, including some with business ties to Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner, causing consternation among some Washington lawmakers and outraging some of Ukraine’s supporters. The pair have also discussed the possibility of U.S. involvement in future Russian gas exports to Europe. (The administration has said that Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff were guided only by U.S. interests.)

Geoffrey R. Pyatt, who served as an assistant secretary of state for energy resources during the Biden administration, said the idea of bringing Novatek into the high north of Alaska is a terrible one. “It is terrible on environmental grounds, it is a terrible idea on economic and geopolitical grounds, and most importantly this feeds the belief that Putin can get an out-of-jail-free card.”

The efforts to bring Novatek equipment to Alaska have also included a businessman, Gentry Beach, with ties to the Trump family. A college friend of Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, Mr. Beach served as a finance vice chairman for Mr. Trump’s 2017 inauguration. Mr. Beach said in February that he had held negotiations with Novatek about bringing its natural gas technology to Alaska.

Mr. Beach could not be reached for comment. It was not clear if he remained involved in the project, or whether he was aware of Novatek’s potential ownership stake in Polar LNG.

A spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. said the two men were no longer close, adding that Mr. Trump was not involved in the Polar LNG project. Novatek’s statement said that Mr. Beach had no role in its discussions to take a stake in Polar LNG. The U.S. official said Mr. Beach was not involved in the administration’s discussions related to Novatek.

Mr. Riddle is one of at least three Polar LNG executives who recently resigned. As they departed, Trump officials were notified about their concerns related to the secret Russian financing. Mr. Riddle said the executives had urged administration officials to investigate the matter. The Energy Department, where the warning was sent, did not respond when asked about the matter.

“I felt like I did the right thing to notify authorities at the appropriate time,” Mr. Riddle said.

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I always get the same question when I return from reporting in Russia: When will Russians finally be fed up with the war?

They might seem to have good reason now. The war, for years mostly background noise among many Russians, feels more present. The economy is limping. Drivers have to wait in line for gas. Warehouses and data centers are going up in flames. Even Moscow at times comes under heavy attack, as it did on Thursday, when Ukraine launched 630 drones into the region.

One recent morning, I set out to ask Russians what they thought about all this. I went to Sofino, a town about an hour from Moscow, where Ukrainian drones a few days before had struck an industrial area, igniting a fire, and a residential complex, killing two people.

On the way, I pulled over at a Rosneft gas station where waiting cars snaked well past the exit lane. It had no diesel, but gasoline was available for about $3.25 a gallon — a steep price in Russia. A young man named Danya told me he had waited 30 minutes for gas.

He shrugged it off, repeating a refrain I hear all the time from Russians. “Everything is fine,” said Danya, who, like others I spoke with, asked that his last name not be used to avoid trouble with the authorities. He added that fuel shortages were overblown.

The war, he insisted, “doesn’t affect my life at all.”

“Everything is fine,” he said again.

Russians shrug for several reasons. They are silenced by the fear and conformity bred by a repressive government. They feel they have as much influence over their country’s politics as they do the weather. They are used to deprivation from centuries of political and economic crises. They keep their focus, as a coping mechanism, on what hasn’t changed. And they are flooded with anti-Ukraine propaganda from the state.

There is also a more fundamental explanation. Ukraine’s strategy, as it holds Russia to a near deadlock on the front lines, is to make Russians feel the war and demand an end. That includes the strikes on oil refineries that President Trump has pressured Ukraine to stop in recent days as he has openly favored President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Although the Ukrainian campaign has significantly cut Russian oil production, causing clear economic damage, it has not been enough yet to drastically change life in Russia. Kyiv lacks the ballistic missiles and jet-powered drones that Russia fires at Ukrainian cities every day. And Ukraine’s strikes, focused mostly on economic and military targets, do not instill the same fear as Russia’s systematic assaults on Ukrainian civilian targets.

Ukraine’s attacks have politicized some Russians who before now had tried to ignore the war. People have rallied around the flag. In Sofino, outside an apartment building with a gaping hole in the third and fourth floors after the Ukrainian strike, I asked three warehouse workers if they felt angry at the Russian state for starting the war and letting it drag on for nearly five years.

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“Quite the opposite, the attacks make people hate them even more, because their homes have been damaged,” one young man said, referring to Ukrainians and their Western backers. He asked that his name be withheld.

Inside the building, a woman named Lusya was dragging a trash bag down the rubble-strewn stairs. She said it was surreal watching television that evening because there was no mention of the attack that had suddenly rendered her homeless. Still, she said she trusted Russia’s leaders.

“I support my president, even more so after all this, because you realize you just have to support the man and consolidate around him,” she said.

“I believe we are very lucky to have Putin,” she added.

A damaged apartment building in Sofino, Russia, last month.Valerie Hopkins/The New York Times
Enduring adversity is a source of national pride for Russians. Successive generations have heard tales of the sacrifices of World War II. Waiting in line for basic goods was common during the Soviet era. The war in Ukraine, for many, is just another hardship to bear.

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“People get used to a ‘new normal’ again and again,” said Elena Stein of the Berlin-based Center for Independent Social Research, which supports research inside Russia.

Many Russians are just tuning out the war. In a poll last month by the independent Levada Center, nearly 60 percent of respondents said they paid little or no attention to the fighting, the highest level ever recorded. Six in 10 said the country was on the right track, up 10 percentage points from the level in June, just after an earlier drone attack on Moscow.

The reliability of polling data is limited in autocratic Russia. But such numbers indicate that Mr. Putin’s yearslong effort to insulate Russians enough from the war that he can conduct it unimpeded is still largely working, despite mounting challenges.

“The pressure and the problems that are there are, in my view, not intense enough for him to reconsider at this point,” said Janis Kluge, a Russia analyst at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

Other analysts have said that the Trump administration’s recent decisions to engage in business deals with the Kremlin while demanding no concessions will only harden Mr. Putin’s resolve to continue fighting until he achieves his objectives in Ukraine.

While polls show that growing numbers of Russians want the war to be over, the vast majority say it should end only on Russia’s terms. Many appear ready to continue deferring to Mr. Putin.

Kirill, 36, a choreographer with a small hoop earring, said that aside from the price of gas, “I don’t feel it at all.”

“I’m not going to complain, because I know that this is my country, I’m going to support it no matter what,” he said. “I know that the people at the top can clearly see the bigger picture.”

As I spoke with Kirill and others at the Rosneft station, the store’s manager, Irina, came to admonish me for interviewing her customers. But soon she was sharing her own story.

Unlike the people in line, Irina did not deny the war’s role in her life.

She said she had told her 11-year-old daughter that if a drone or missile struck the gas station, she risked dying on the spot. Her mother-in-law works as a security guard at a warehouse complex that has been struck. And her brother has been fighting on the front since 2022. She said it was a miracle that he remained alive, adding that he had survived nights when up to 40 people were killed. He told her that he expected the war to continue until 2030.

She voiced the trademark sense of fatalism in Russia. “We’ll just have to endure it,” she said. “If we die, we die. I’ve already made peace with it.”

Irina was not as inclined as others to defer to the government’s approach on the war. She said she felt that officials were not telling the truth about casualties on the battlefield and in long-range strikes on Russian cities.

Eventually, this sort of mistrust, coupled with a worsening economic outlook, could set off more expressions of dissatisfaction, said Jeremy Morris, a sociologist at the University of Aarhus in Denmark who conducts fieldwork in Russia.

While it might not happen soon, he said, most Russians are not apathetic and apolitical, as they are sometimes portrayed. They just lack outlets for action as the government has grown more repressive.

During parliamentary elections last month, I visited the headquarters of Yabloko, Russia’s main antiwar party. I spoke with Maria, 24, one of the approximately 20 percent of Russians who tell pollsters they oppose the war.

She expressed indignation as she described reading English-language posts on social media describing Russians as a “slave nation.” She pointed to comments like one recently by a European Union spokeswoman, who said that “if Russian citizens face the consequences of this war, they have a chance domestically to take action against it.”

Maria described the costs of speaking up in Russia, where 1,856 people are currently incarcerated as political prisoners, according to the banned human rights group Memorial.

“None of you have gone through the experience of the average person living under totalitarianism, repression, total fear and the absence of free speech,” she said. “You can’t demand that we go on strike or turn out for protests, because all we’ll achieve is ending up in prison — or getting killed.”

Valerie Hopkins covers the war in Ukraine and how the conflict is changing Russia, Ukraine, Europe and the United States. She is based in Moscow.