Holtec Brand Guidelines: Krishna Singh’s 1986 Fuel-Cask Maker & the Palisades Restart

An engineer’s firm built around used fuel.

Holtec International was founded in 1986 by the engineer Krishna P. Singh in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, English Wikipedia says. It began by supplying equipment for storing spent nuclear fuel, first in the pools beside reactors and then in dry casks, and that remains a core business. Singh still leads the company as founder and chief executive, NJ Spotlight News reported in January 2024, and the company is today based in Camden, across the Delaware River from Philadelphia.

The company’s website lists its dry storage and transport casks under the names HI-STORM, HI-STAR, HI-TRAC and HI-SAFE, and describes Holtec as specialising in spent fuel storage, small modular reactors and plant decommissioning. Its own tagline is “A Generation Ahead by Design.”

Making things has been part of the story for decades. In July 2016 Industry Today described the Holtec Manufacturing Division working from the former Westinghouse East Pittsburgh Works, a historic industrial site now called Keystone Commons, where it built storage and shipping containers for spent fuel, heat exchangers and pressure vessels, including equipment designed by outside clients. Today the company lists manufacturing in Camden and East Pittsburgh, at Orrville in Ohio and at Dahej in India.

Casks, decommissioning and small reactors.

From storage Holtec moved into taking whole plants apart. English Wikipedia lists decommissioning contracts at Oyster Creek in New Jersey, Indian Point in New York and Pilgrim in Massachusetts, among others, and the company names a dedicated unit, Holtec Decommissioning International, among its divisions. It also proposed a consolidated interim storage site for used fuel in southeast New Mexico, called HI-STORE; NJ Spotlight News reported in January 2024 that the project had been approved by federal regulators the previous year and faced a court challenge from private groups and New Mexico officials.

Its reactor ambitions date from 2010, when it announced the SMR-160, a small modular pressurised-water reactor. In February 2018 GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, now part of GE Vernova, agreed to work with Holtec on bringing the design to market, and in 2020 the company agreed to use a fuel assembly from Framatome, English Wikipedia says, citing World Nuclear News. The design later grew into the SMR-300, which entered the UK’s Generic Design Assessment in December 2023, English Wikipedia says; the same source records a South Yorkshire factory announced in September 2024 to build it for European and Middle Eastern markets, and a June 2026 proposal with EDF Energy for up to four units at the former Cottam power station site in England.

The company has also faced legal scrutiny, which belongs in its history. In 2010 the Tennessee Valley Authority fined Holtec and barred it from federal work for 60 days after a bribery investigation involving dealings with a subcontractor, NJ Spotlight News reported. In January 2024 New Jersey’s attorney general announced a non-prosecution agreement after a criminal investigation found the company had submitted false information when applying for a state tax break; Holtec paid a penalty, lost that award and accepted three years of independent monitoring. Holtec denied wrongdoing and called the agreement a settlement.

Design and documentation.

Nuclear companies sell to a small number of buyers — utilities, governments and regulators — over very long timescales, and their imagery tends to reflect that. Corporate pages and reports often return to the same few scenes: cooling towers and reactor domes photographed under clear skies, turbine halls in clean, even light, and wide views of plants set against water or open country.

Newer reactor designers, many of which have not yet built a commercial plant, lean on renders instead. Small modular plants appear as low, compact buildings in green landscapes, sometimes beside a town or a data centre, with no smoke and few people. Large-reactor vendors show construction sites, cranes and heavy components such as reactor vessels and steam generators on the move, a way of picturing scale and progress at once.

People appear mostly as engineers in hard hats and overalls, inspecting a weld, reading a control-room screen or handling fuel. Two images recur across the trade: the blue Cherenkov glow of a spent-fuel or research-reactor pool, caused by charged particles travelling through water faster than light does in it, and ceramic fuel pellets held in a gloved hand. Both are used to make an invisible process visible.

The industry also presents itself in person, at trade gatherings such as the World Nuclear Exhibition and the meetings of the American Nuclear Society, where stands, renders and scale models carry much of the message. The companies in this guide range from Framatome, founded in 1958, and Urenco, set up by treaty in the early 1970s, to much younger reactor designers, and their visual languages vary just as widely.

Palisades, a stalled listing and a closed plant brought back.

The project that made Holtec widely known is Palisades, a nuclear plant at Covert, Michigan, that closed in 2022. Holtec bought it from Entergy to decommission it, English Wikipedia says, then set out to return it to service — what Holtec describes as the first restart of a US plant after permanent shutdown. The American Nuclear Society’s Nuclear Newswire reported in July 2026 that the major restart projects, including turbine-generator work and a new fuel-handling machine, had been closed out after a programme that also covered reactor vessel inspections, steam generator tube refurbishment and the retraining and requalification of operators; more than 5,000 smaller work activities remained, and an earlier target of the end of February 2026 had passed without a firm date. A federal court in Michigan had dismissed a lawsuit by three environmental groups seeking to block the restart, and Singh told the Financial Times he expected the plant to restart in 2026.

Fuel loading then ran into difficulty. A fuel assembly tilted over in the reactor after being released by the refuelling machine, the American Nuclear Society reported in October 2026; Holtec asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for urgent permission to remove it with custom equipment, and the regulator issued that amendment on 13 October. Holtec also plans two SMR-300 units at the same site.

The company tried to go public in 2026. In September, Nuclear Engineering International reported, the listing vehicle Holtec Nuclear Corporation postponed its planned US initial public offering, citing a sharp shift in market sentiment around the AI data-centre trade, while keeping its registration on file with the SEC. Holtec remains privately held.

For a design guide, Holtec shows how a technical supplier builds an identity from product names and big projects rather than from consumer advertising. Compare GE Vernova, its early reactor partner, and Framatome. For this guide we use navy, grey and a copper accent with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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