U.S. Nuclear Fleet Leans on AI as Workforce Shrinks and Paperwork Mounts
Most U.S. nuclear reactors have adopted AI tools this year, mainly for paperwork and compliance, not operations.
In August, California-based Atomic Canyon launched NIVA, the Nuclear Industry Virtual Assistant, which was developed in cooperation with nuclear-industry groups. The assistant was pilot-tested in nuclear plants run by Constellation Energy and is now available to the United States' entire fleet of reactors. Meanwhile, the AI-for-nuclear startup Nuclearn says its products have gone to work with more than 65 U.S. partners, including many traditional plants and an integration with NuScale Power Corp., which is working toward advanced small nuclear reactors.
Microsoft and Nvidia have collaborated on a project to apply AI toward optimizing the entire life cycle of a nuclear plant, spanning site permitting, design, construction, and continuous operations.
Nuclearn CFO and cofounder Jerrold Vincent said the reason for the rapid adoption is twofold. First, the technology companies banking their futures on AI are also keen on a revival of nuclear power to provide electricity for data centers. Vincent says AI is also ideal for addressing some of the nuclear industry's most pressing problems. Many of the things that make reactors so difficult to operate, including intricate regulations and complex systems for management and maintenance, are exactly the kinds of tasks AI is good at. The industry is staggering to deal with aging hardware and an aging workforce. If it is going to survive, and have a real shot at a nuclear revival, it will need help from machine intelligence, Vincent says.
Right now, the principal output of a nuclear reactor aside from electricity is paperwork. Nuclear plants produce piles of documentation to demonstrate regulatory compliance and to record how they respond to any potential problem, from a crack in the sidewalk to a fault in the reactor. Nuclearn's AI products help plants search through large repositories of data more efficiently to more quickly file paperwork with the federal government or figure out how a particular problem was solved in the past. "If you think of it as ChatGPT for nuclear," he says, "it's actually not a bad place to start."
The IEEE Spectrum article points out that this is especially important because the nuclear power industry "has a remarkably skilled but quickly shrinking workforce tasked with keeping old reactors online and possibly starting up new ones to meet surging demand for electricity." It also stresses that "So far, both the Nuclearn and NIVA large language models used in the nuclear world report to humans and don't go anywhere near power plant operations."