Atomic Canyon launches virtual assistant for US nuclear fleet

NIVA helps nuclear professionals find and apply knowledge buried in technical, regulatory, and operational records, Atomic Canyon said. The launch is based on two "assistants": a Knowledge Assistant, which draws on "industry content, from NRC Reg Guides and NUREGs to NEI guidance, INPO standards, and EPRI technical reports" to answer "plain language" questions; and an Operating Experience Assistant, which "surfaces relevant operating experience by meaning and context, not just keywords, then lets you chat directly with the results to dig deeper."

A Troubleshooting assistant is in development, with a pilot targeted for later this year.

NIVA runs on Atomic Canyon's Neutron AI "workbench". FERMI - the company's family of nuclear domain-specific AI models, is the retrieval engine.

FERMI is trained on more than 53 million pages of US Nuclear Regulatory Commission data with Oak Ridge National Laboratory on the Frontier exascale supercomputer (and open source on Hugging Face), and "understands nuclear terminology, acronyms, and context in ways general-purpose AI cannot. That is what lets NIVA surface the right record instead of a keyword match," Atomic Canyon says.

"Neutron is the platform those capabilities live in. NIVA puts them to work across the collective knowledge of the industry; Neutron brings the same purpose-built AI tools inside the plant, connected to a station's own licensing basis, procedures, maintenance history, and engineering records."

In November 2024, Atomic Canyon announced the commercial installation of its Neutron Enterprise solution at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California, in what was said to be the first on-site deployment of a generative AI solution at a US nuclear power plant. The launch of NIVA "moves AI in nuclear from pilot testing into everyday operational use," the company added. 

NIVA's assistants were piloted across the industry for six months, with early adopters including Constellation Energy, operator of 21 reactors across 12 plants. "The nuclear industry has built decades of knowledge and operating experience. As Constellation helps power the growth of AI, we're also exploring how AI tools can help our employees more easily access and apply that expertise to strengthen operations, support knowledge transfer and improve workforce effectiveness," Constellation's Senior Vice President, Governance & Oversight, Frank Sturniolo said.

"This is a defining moment for the nuclear industry," Trey Lauderdale, Atomic Canyon founder and CEO, said. "The US nuclear sector sits on decades of invaluable technical and operational knowledge, but too much of that knowledge remains difficult to access at the speed modern deployments require. The fleetwide availability of NIVA shows that AI in nuclear power is real, operational, and ready to be deployed responsibly at a fleetwide scale."

Alongside the fleetwide launch, Atomic Canyon said it has raised new funding from technology company NVIDIA, innovation-focused venture capital firm Plug and Play Ventures, and Tim Buckley, former CEO of The Vanguard Group. This capital will help it to scale deployment and continue expanding NIVA's capabilities, the company said.

"We built Atomic Canyon around nuclear. We trained our own models with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, deployed the first on-site generative AI system at a US nuclear plant at PG&E's Diablo Canyon, and spent years learning how plant professionals actually work before we wrote a line of code for NIVA. Bringing it to every plant across the fleet is what comes next, and the goal is still the same: less time searching, more time doing the work that keeps plants running safely," the company said.