nuclear-news

A 12-foot bundle of 216 fuel rods tilted over inside the first American reactor being pulled back from decommissioning, after the loading machine had set it in the core and let go, and engineers are now designing tools just to lift that one bundle back out

Luis Reyes, Sep 23, 26, https://www.autonocion.com/us/fuel-bundle-tilted-palisades-core/#goog_rewarded

Three weeks ago, Palisades was the feel-good nuclear story of the year. On August 30, a crew at the shut-down plant on the Lake Michigan shore started lowering fuel bundles back into a reactor that had been sitting empty since 2022, the first time anyone has tried to pull an American reactor back out of decommissioning and switch it on again. Holtec, the owner, posted photos of blue water and a brand-new loading machine. Everyone covered it, including us.

Well, about that.

One of those fuel bundles isn’t standing up straight anymore. Holtec confirmed on September 21 that during fuel loading, one assembly “tilted from its upright position” after the crew had set it in the core and the loading machine’s grapple had already let go of it. Fuel loading has been paused ever since, and the company is now designing equipment just to lift that one bundle back out of the vessel and get it back to the plant’s spent fuel pool.

And you didn’t hear about it from Holtec. The first public version came from Reddit.

So what actually happened inside the vessel?

If you’ve never seen a nuclear fuel assembly, picture a bundle of 216 skinny metal rods packed into a square frame, standing about 12 feet tall, according to Holtec. The Palisades core takes 204 of them, slotted upright side by side like books in a crate. A machine rolling on rails over the flooded reactor pit grabs each assembly by the top, drives it over the right slot, lowers it in, and lets go.

Somewhere in the first days of loading, one of them got placed, got released, and then leaned over. Holtec hasn’t said how far it tilted, what it’s resting against, or how many assemblies were already sitting in the core when everything stopped. I’d genuinely like to know that last one, because it tells you how much of the job was left.

The regulator, at least, has been reassuring. Viktoria Mitlyng, a spokeswoman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told The National there was “no radiological release” and no one got hurt. Holtec says it notified the NRC right away, and the plant’s own evaluation concluded the event didn’t rise to the level that triggers formal safety reporting. Which is why you didn’t hear about it. No one was required to tell you.

The regulator says tipped, not dropped

So how did the news get out? An anonymous Reddit post claimed the plant had dropped a partially used fuel assembly during loading. Edwin Lyman, a physicist who runs nuclear power safety work at the Union of Concerned Scientists, amplified the post and pointed out that more than two weeks had gone by with, in his words, “nothing but silence” from the company or the regulator. The National then put the question to the NRC, Mitlyng answered on September 21, and Holtec’s statement went up shortly after the paper published, by The National’s own account.

Does the difference between tipped and dropped actually matter? It does, and it’s pretty much the whole story. A dropped assembly means the machine lost its grip mid-lift and 12 feet of fuel rods came down onto whatever was underneath, and now you’re checking neighbors for damage. A tipped one means the bundle was already seated, the grapple had cleanly let go, and the thing leaned over afterward. Mitlyng was careful to make exactly that correction, and frankly she was right to, and that’s two very different days at a nuclear plant.

hat still leaves an obvious question. Fuel assemblies aren’t supposed to lean.

Holtec has started a root cause evaluation to figure out why this one did, and until that comes back, no one outside the company can tell you whether the problem is the bundle, the slot, or the handling. The fuel in this core is a mix of fresh assemblies and partially used ones from the plant’s last runs before the 2022 shutdown, and Holtec hasn’t said which kind the leaning one is.

Getting one bundle out takes new tools and a license change

Here’s where it gets unusual. You can’t just send the loading machine back to pick the assembly up, apparently, because Holtec’s in-house engineering team is designing purpose-built retrieval and storage gear to carry the bundle back to the pool. The company also has a License Amendment Request in the works with the NRC, covering the retrieval method itself.

A License Amendment Request is basically the plant asking the regulator, in writing, for permission to do something its current license doesn’t cover, and the NRC reviews it before anyone touches anything. Mitlyng said the agency will evaluate it thoroughly, and NRC inspectors have been watching the fuel handling work on site from the start.

None of that is fast. Holtec has been telling people it wants Palisades back in service late this year or in early 2027, and that target has already moved more than once. Designing new tooling, getting a license amendment through the NRC, and pulling a leaning fuel assembly out of a reactor vessel doesn’t strike me as a quick detour, though I’ll admit the NRC has moved faster on this project than on pretty much anything else in its recent history.

The rest of the plant keeps moving

The tilted bundle hasn’t frozen the whole site. On September 11, Palisades reconnected to its 345-kilovolt switchyard after restoration work with ITC, the company that owns the transmission lines serving the plant. The switchyard is the plant’s on-ramp to the grid, the path its electricity takes out once the reactor is running, so that box had to get checked no matter what happens in the vessel.

After the leaning assembly is dealt with and the rest of the fuel goes in, the vessel gets bolted back together and the plant moves to Cold Shutdown, the next stop on the checklist toward actually making power. There’s still testing and NRC sign-offs stacked up beyond that.

Holtec says the root cause evaluation is underway and the retrieval equipment and license paperwork are both in the works, and as of the company’s September 21 update, fuel loading at Palisades is still on hold.

September 29, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | incidents, USA | Leave a comment

Shadow cast over US nuclear revival after Palisades reactor incident

As new fuel was being lowered into the reactor – dubbed a “zombie reactor”, as it is being restarted after decommissioning – one of the fuel assemblies tipped, causing resumption to be placed on hold while Holtec assesses the situation.

“The significance of this is that the reactor core and the nuclear fuel is the most dangerous part of a nuclear power plant,”

Nuclear regulator investigating issue at site in Michigan where restart plans are well under way

Cody Combs, Washington, September 23, 2026, https://www.thenationalnews.com/future/technology/2026/09/23/palisades-power-plant-nuclear-incident/

An incident at Palisades, a nuclear reactor in Michigan that is soon to be restarted, has cast a shadow over an apparent nuclear energy renaissance in the US.

The revival has been driven largely by the proliferation of energy-hungry data centres as part of the vast investment in artificial intelligence.

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission confirmed to The National it was investigating a “tipped fuel assembly” incident at the site in Covert, Michigan.

Though closed in 2022, the reactor, later bought by Holtec International, is expected to make a comeback as AI-based energy demands exert strain on the US energy grid.

As new fuel was being lowered into the reactor – dubbed a “zombie reactor”, as it is being restarted after decommissioning – one of the fuel assemblies tipped, causing resumption to be placed on hold while Holtec assesses the situation.

An NRC spokeswoman emphasised there had been “no radiological release” and that no workers or the public have been affected. “Our inspectors will continue monitoring the situation,” Viktoria Mitlyng said.

Yet the incident has fed some nearby residents’ concerns about the unprecedented nature of restarting a nuclear reactor.

“The significance of this is that the reactor core and the nuclear fuel is the most dangerous part of a nuclear power plant,” long-time nuclear energy critic Kevin Kamps, founder and director of environmental advocacy group Don’t Waste Michigan, told ABC57.

He said the 55-year-old plant had a series of problems during the last 15 years of its operations before closing.

Before it was bought by Holtec, a 2012 NRC report warned about the work culture at Palisades, where it said safety concerns were often dismissed.

In 2016, security staff at the reactor were placed on leave from the plant, then owned by Entergy, for failing to properly follow fire-prevention protocol.

A little more than a year ago, a worker at Palisades fell off a refuelling bridge into a pool of water, though they were not seriously injured.

Shortly after the NRC’s confirmation of the incident at Palisades, the company wrote what it called a “progress report” on its website.

“Plant personnel evaluated the incident and determined that it did not trigger the safety reporting requirements under NRC regulations,” it read. It also said “fuel loading remains paused while Holtec addresses the affected fuel assembly”.

In a statement provided to The National on Wednesday, a public affairs official with Holtec addressed the incident, re-emphasising that the “fuel remains intact, and there was no radiological release or injury associated with the issue”.

He added that Holtec does not have plans to release any photographs of the accident “at this time”.

Long-time nuclear industry critic Edwin Lyman, a physicist and the director of nuclear power safety with the Union of Concerned Scientists, first raised concerns about the Palisades incident shortly before the NRC confirmed what had taken place on Monday.

He remains skeptical about Holtec’s integrity and curious about what transpired.

“They already had some glitches, including a recent issue with improperly doing surveys of areas where there was airborne radioactivity for which they got violations,” he explained, adding that sees the company as having somewhat of a stigma when it comes to safety.

“In the moments leading up to their initial public offering they were putting out press releases about the progress being made and how they were loading fuel, but then all of a sudden word spreads about this accident,” he said, pointing out that Holtec postponed the IPO days before acknowledging the recent incident at Palisades.

Mr Lyman said that Holtec, other energy providers and several Big Tech companies were doing “performative exercises by trying to show that nuclear power can quickly” be a solution.

Michael Keegan, chair of Don’t Waste Michigan, echoed Mr Lyman’s speculation about Holtec’s handling of the incident.

“It is not a coincidence that Holtec’s IPO withdrawal, years in the planning, could not go forward with pending bad news of a major refueling snafu at the end of August,” he said.

Palisades has become something of a poster child for the NRC, which under the influence of President Donald Trump has become vocal about the need for more nuclear energy projects throughout the US.

On September 2, days after the Palisades fuel incident, the NRC said the plant was moving “closer to restart”.

In recent months, the NRC has announced new policies related to “microreactors” and “small-modular reactors” (SMRs), which have been the source of vast investment from Big Tech.

Though often portrayed as safer and less aesthetically disruptive than conventional nuclear reactor designs, the modular reactors and companies behind them are not without controversy.

In a recent blog post, Beyond Nuclear, a Maryland-based non-profit safety watchdog, said the “SMR renaissance is more sound and fury, signifying nothing”. It pointed no SMRs are currently out operational in the US and said SMR companies have lost value.

“It’s specifically nuclear offerings in which the confidence has been lost, as evidenced by the recent shorting of shares in NuScale Power, Nano Nuclear and Oklo, and the plummeting market value of X-energy,” the organisation wrote.

Meanwhile, despite the Palisades mishap, Holtec is projecting optimism. “We remain focused on returning Palisades to safe and reliable operation once all restart work is complete, and all applicable federal requirements and industry standards are met,” the company said.

Holtec is not alone in trying to bring a closed plant back online amid the AI-induced energy boom.

In Middletown, Pennsylvania work is under way to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor, which closed in 2012, as part of a deal involving Microsoft to help power its data centres.

September 26, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | incidents, USA | Leave a comment