Florida Power & Light’s St. Lucie Nuclear Plant sets an industry record completing pool-to-pad used fuel transfer in mere 56.15 hours

Florida Power & Light’s (FPL) St. Lucie Nuclear Plant completed loading of 12 HI-STORM FW cask systems, each containing 37 PWR spent fuel assemblies. This milestone marks the site’s full transition from its legacy horizontal spent fuel storage technology to Holtec’s high-capacity HI-STORM FW system. Holtec’s Global Site Services unit safely transferred a total of 444 spent fuel assemblies from the plant’s spent fuel pools into dry storage.

The team achieved an average pool-to-pad duration of 2.8 days per multi-purpose canister, with the fastest loading completed in just 56.15 hours—setting a new benchmark for performance and efficiency in the industry. Demonstrating Holtec’s commitment to technological innovation and continuous improvement, the St. Lucie project employed several of our latest technological innovations developed with input from our Holtec User Group (HUG) which included the “threadless” Remote Valve Assembly device, the Embedded Drain Line, and the “Boltless” Mating Device. These mechanical innovations collectively enhanced safety, reliability, and operational efficiency throughout the St. Lucie loading campaign.

A defining feature of this project was our deployment of proven technology to coax additional storage capacity from the existing Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation pad, which was designed to store legacy supplier’s casks. This innovative solution reduced the site boundary dose by creating a self-shielding cask array configuration and allowed FPL to defer the need for new pad construction by many years. The same technology was employed at Holtec’s Oyster Creek site three years ago. To alleviate the space constraint faced by several of our client sites, Holtec is nearing the certification of “extended HI-STORM” embodiment by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which will effectively double the site’s storage capacity by essentially doubling the storage density on the pad.  

Bob Coffey, Executive Vice President and Chief Nuclear Officer for NextEra Energy, FPL’s parent company, thanked Holtec’s Global Site Services business unit for their outstanding execution and congratulated the plant’s organization “for providing the superb support and an engaged collaboration with the Holtec team, which helped make the record-breaking dry storage performance at our St. Lucie site possible.”