Palisades Restart Stalls on Tilted Fuel Assembly — Holtec Files Emergency License Amendment
America's first restart of a fully shuttered commercial power reactor hit a physical snag. Fuel loading at Palisades (Covert, Mich.) began August 30, 2026; during loading, fuel assembly DD41 "was placed in core location H-1 but tilted over after being released by the refueling machine" — left at a 30-degree angle from the core plate, its upper tie plate leaning against the core shroud. The NRC says the fuel rods "have retained their integrity," no other assemblies were affected, and the assembly "is currently stable and has not moved."
Because removing a tilted assembly requires deviating from Holtec's updated safety analysis, Holtec submitted an emergency license amendment request (LAR) on September 30 — asking for approval within two days — to use a custom-fabricated recovery tool and fuel transfer canister on a one-time basis. The urgency is explicit in Holtec's own words: "[Palisades] is requesting emergency processing of this license amendment request as a delay in approval of the proposed changes would result in a delay in the resumption of activities necessary to reach the plant conditions required to restore the plant to power operation."
Status as of Oct 8: the NRC issued a preliminary determination that the amendment involves no significant hazards consideration ("does not 'significantly increase the probability or consequences of any accident previously considered, nor create the possibility of an accident of a different kind, nor significantly decrease any margin of safety'"), and the public comment period closed the afternoon of October 8. No restart timeline has been re-published since the incident; the plant had been expected to return to service around late 2026/early 2027 after earlier delays for steam generator tube repairs.
The same day as the LAR (Sept 30), Holtec's subsidiary SMR LLC submitted the preliminary safety analysis report for two SMR-300 units ("Pioneer-1" and "-2," 340 MWe each) at the Palisades Energy Campus, and the NRC began a four-week Federal Register notice period (from Oct 1) on the first part of that construction permit application — the limited work authorization request.
Meaning: Restart projects were the sector's proof that firm nuclear megawatts can come back online in years rather than decades — Palisades, Three Mile Island/Crane (Microsoft, 2H 2027 target), and NextEra's Iowa restart (Google). The Palisades incident is the first concrete demonstration that restart timelines carry real execution risk: a single tilted fuel assembly paused the path to criticality and required emergency regulatory processing. Watch whether the NRC's approval and the recovery operation stay on the scale of days-to-weeks (benign) or slip into a schedule revision (a negative read-across for the whole restart cohort, including Constellation Energy Wins Critical FERC Waiver and Lifts 2026 Guidance on Strong Nuclear Demand).