Exclusive: AI-nuclear partnership aims to streamline licensing
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DOE's Oak Ridge National Lab and the AI startup Atomic Canyon will announce a collaboration Tuesday to streamline licensing for new nuclear plants.
Why it matters: Navigating the Nuclear Regulatory Commission process is complex and time-consuming, even as U.S. power demand rises and hyperscalers seek new electrons for AI data centers.
- The collaboration would expand Atomic Canyon's business, which has focused on helping owners of existing reactors use AI in regulatory compliance.
The big picture: The plan is to "use high-performance computing to create high-fidelity simulations that ensure the safety of designs while accelerating licensing with artificial intelligence to automate aspects of the review process," the lab and company said.
State of play: Trump 2.0 officials are trying to speed up deployment of new plants of various shapes and sizes, including SMRs and gigawatt-scale units.
- One of President Trump's recent nuclear executive orders gives the NRC 18 months to reach final decisions on applications to build and operate new reactors.
"The NRC and the industry at large is going to need a lot of help to make it so they can hit those deadlines, and our view is artificial intelligence is going to play a key role in enabling that," Atomic Canyon CEO Trey Lauderdale tells Axios.
How it works: Oak Ridge is home to massive computing power deployed to help train Atomic Canyon's AI model that's based on over 50 million pages of highly technical NRC documents.
- ORNL director Stephen Streiffer tells Axios that using AI does not replace human beings, who perform final validation. Instead, he says, this use case for AI enables more speed and stronger design safety work.
- "Where AI becomes useful is that it's helping the regulator, and it's helping the power plant builder, make sure that there are no gaps in the safety analysis," he said in an interview.
Catch up quick: The ORNL-Atomic Canyon collaboration is part of a wider trend of harnessing AI to help with regulations for existing and future nuclear reactors.
- DOE's Idaho National Lab will use a Microsoft tool to create safety and analysis reports that are part of construction and license applications, the parties said last week.
- Also last week, Westinghouse and Google said they're working together to harness AI to make building Westinghouse reactors an "efficient, repeatable process."
The bottom line: "We're trying to get nuclear reactors onto the grid so that we can increase the energy supply and hopefully ultimately decrease the price to consumers in the U.S., where part of that demand itself is driven by AI," Streiffer said.
- "And we can make that happen more quickly with AI as well. And that's really exciting."
