On September 21, Holtec International published a progress report on its effort to restart the Palisades nuclear plant in Covert Township, Michigan. The report describes steady progress on several fronts. It also discloses that the most delicate step of the restart has stalled.
Fuel loading began on August 30, when the plant entered Mode 6, the refueling condition. During loading, according to the company, one fuel assembly “tilted from its upright position after it had been placed, and the fuel-handling machine grapple had been disengaged.” Holtec says plant personnel responded in accordance with established procedures and notified the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and that the event did not trigger the agency’s safety reporting requirements. Fuel loading, the company writes, “remains paused while Holtec addresses the affected fuel assembly.”
The NRC has said the same. Agency spokesperson Viktoria Mitlyng told The National there was no radiological release and that no workers or members of the public were affected, and that the assembly was tipped rather than dropped. Inspectors are monitoring the response.
What it takes to put one assembly back where it belongs is the part worth reading closely. Holtec has opened a root cause evaluation under the plant’s nuclear quality assurance program. Its corporate engineering division is designing and building equipment to retrieve the assembly and return it to the spent fuel pool. And the company is preparing a License Amendment Request for the NRC covering the method it proposes to use. Until that work is finished, the plant cannot move on to the next stages of startup.
Other restart work continues in parallel. On September 11, Palisades reconnected to the 345-kilovolt switchyard after extensive restoration coordinated with ITC, the transmission owner — a real milestone, and the eventual path for the plant’s power to reach the grid. Progression through the remaining operating modes, Holtec notes, still depends on resolving the fuel assembly, completing testing and modifications, and obtaining the NRC approvals that apply.
WHY THIS MATTERS HERE
Palisades is a reactor site. It was built to handle nuclear fuel, it is staffed by crews trained to do it, and the equipment there was designed for the job. One assembly out of position has still stopped the work for weeks and now requires custom-built equipment and a federal license amendment before it can be corrected.
That is not a scandal. It is the ordinary difficulty of handling spent nuclear fuel, described by the company doing the handling. And it is the context in which the Basin is asked to consider something larger. A federal license still allows up to 5,500 tons of spent nuclear fuel to be brought to Andrews County and stored there for 40 years, with a possible 40-year renewal. A similar license is held about 40 miles away in Lea County, New Mexico.
Protect the Basin is not opposed to nuclear power. We are asking that the waste side of the industry be built the way the generating side is — on engineering that is proven before it is scaled, on schedules set by the work rather than by announcements, and on the genuine consent of the people who would live beside it. The people of the Basin have never been offered that say. This week is a reminder of why it matters.
Read Holtec’s full update.