As a core product that can affect the controllable nuclear fission reaction, the reliability of PWR fuel is directly related to the safety of nuclear power operation. In recent years, many advanced fuel parts have adopted additive manufacturing(hereinafter referred to as AM) ideas, but they have been lacking practical application, because the reliability of AM products has not been widely recognized. At present, most of the fuel parts are still processed using traditional subtractive manufacturing methods (Yang, China Metal Bulletin 2: 104–105, 2019), and the reliability of the parts is generally indirectly guaranteed by destructive inspection of the local physical, chemical and structural properties of the raw material blanks. However, due to the process characteristics of layer-by-layer printing, AM parts may themselves have the problem of material anisotropy, and even if the destructive inspection of the AM parts is carried out, it cannot be proved that the characteristics of the material in the rest of the parts are consistent with the sampling position. Moreover, common methods of damage inspection will greatly increase the manufacturing cost of the product, and the economy is not good. Therefore, it is necessary to study the reliability assurance methods to solve the biggest obstacle plaguing the industrialization of fuel AM. In this paper, the research progress of reliability assurance methods for AM parts is introduced from three aspects: SLM (Hong, et al. Sci Technol Vis 17: 118–122, 2020) forming, process quality control, and nondestructive inspection of printing defects. The research has certain significance for accelerating the industrialization process of AM technology in the field of nuclear fuel.