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Fuel loading process begins at Palisades
The Palisades nuclear power plant has drawn closer to restart, as plant staff began the process of loading fuel into the reactor vessel on Sunday morning.
The commencement of fuel loading places the Covert, Mich., facility in Mode 6—or the refueling stage—under the plant’s technical specifications, plant owner and operator Holtec International said in a news release. The Palisades reactor core consists of 204 fuel assemblies that include new fuel and partially used fuel from the plant’s most recent operating cycles. According to Holtec, the fuel loading is being conducted in accordance with plant procedures and technical specifications.
Thayz Gomes Ferreira, Alexis Jinaphanh, Davide Mancusi, Andrea Zoia
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 200 | Number 4 | April 2026 | Pages 943-975
Regular Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2025.2496859
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this work, we examine the behavior of zero-variance Monte Carlo games for radiation shielding problems in the presence of neutron multiplication, whose prominent application is the analysis of in-core and ex-core detector responses during reactor start-up. Prompted by previous investigations, which had shown that the conflict between the importance of the fissile regions and the importance of the detector might lead to numerical instabilities in Consistent Adjoint-Driven Importance Sampling (CADIS) strategies, we set out to explore these techniques within a simple benchmark configuration where exact zero-variance sampling can be implemented. The configurations examined here do not display any of the instabilities observed for CADIS-like schemes including neutron multiplication, which might be due to the use of branchless sampling for the collision events. Furthermore, our findings establish a clear framework that can be more broadly applied for the analysis of the robustness of ideal CADIS schemes.