U.S. NRC Expedites Review of License Amendment for Palisades Nuclear Plant Fuel Loading Tilt Incident: Advancing Vanguard SMR Construction Permit Review in Parallel

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is reviewing an emergency operating license amendment request (LAR) submitted by Holtec International. The request was triggered by a nuclear fuel loading tilt incident at the Palisades Nuclear Power Plant (Palisades NPP) in Covert, Michigan, during its restart process, which has resulted in the temporary suspension of some on-site restart recovery operations.

According to the application documents publicly available in the NRC's public records system, fuel assembly number DD41 tilted after being released by the fuel handling machine. The lower nozzle of the assembly remains in the core grid position H-1, but the upper portion forms an approximately 30-degree tilt angle with the core plate, with the upper nozzle resting against the opposite side of the core shroud. The NRC and the operator confirmed that the affected assembly and other assemblies in the core remain structurally intact, no fuel rod cladding failure or leakage has occurred, and the tilted assembly is currently in a controlled and stable condition under close monitoring.

To safely retrieve the affected assembly, Holtec submitted an emergency request to the NRC for a "one-time effective" technical amendment to the Updated Final Safety Analysis Report (UFSAR). The on-site engineering team has specifically designed and fabricated a set of custom retrieval tools and a specialized Fuel Transfer Canister, with plans to use a non-standard transfer path to safely move the tilted assembly from the reactor pressure vessel to the spent fuel pool. NRC technical reviewers preliminarily assessed that this handling plan will not significantly increase the probability or consequences of existing design-basis accidents and does not involve significant safety risks.

While addressing the loading incident, the small modular reactor new-build project at the Palisades site has also achieved key regulatory progress. Holtec's subsidiary SMR LLC has formally submitted a Preliminary Safety Analysis Report (PSAR) to the NRC as the core document for its application for a phased construction of two SMR-300 units at the Palisades site (project named Vanguard 1 and 2, with a single-unit capacity of 340 MWe). The NRC has since October 1 initiated public notice and compliance review through the Federal Register for the first-phase construction permit application of the SMR project.

Keywords: Palisades Nuclear Power Plant, fuel loading incident, license amendment, small modular reactor