Atomic Canyon Launches Fleetwide AI Assistant for Nuclear

Atomic Canyon has launched its Nuclear Industry Virtual Assistant (NIVA) across the North American commercial nuclear fleet. The company says the artificial intelligence platform is now available to commercial nuclear plants that are members of the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO), EPRI, and the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI).

NIVA is designed to address a long-standing information access problem in the nuclear sector. The industry has accumulated decades of operating experience, technical research, and regulatory guidance. However, this knowledge is often siloed across separate systems that were not designed to work together. When responding to an equipment issue or preparing for an outage, professionals may have to search several different systems and manually piece together an answer.

"The goal is to spend less time searching for information and more time putting nuclear expertise to work," Atomic Canyon founder and CEO Trey Lauderdale told POWER magazine.

Platform Capabilities and Deployment

The fleetwide launch follows a six-month industry pilot. NIVA runs on Atomic Canyon's Neutron platform and its FERMI family of nuclear-domain AI models. The company states that FERMI was trained on more than 53 million pages of U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) data. This work was conducted in collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory using the Frontier exascale supercomputer.

NIVA is built around shared industry information. Its Knowledge Assistant includes NRC Regulatory Guides and NUREGs, NEI guidance, INPO standards, and EPRI technical reports. A separate Operating Experience Assistant is designed to surface relevant industry operating experience based on meaning and context, moving beyond simple keyword searches.

Integration with Existing Plant Systems

NIVA is positioned to sit alongside the industry's existing knowledge sources, not replace them. The platform makes information easier to find and understand. For plant-specific information, Atomic Canyon offers Neutron Enterprise. This version of the technology can connect to a plant's licensing basis, procedures, maintenance history, engineering records, drawings, work orders, and corrective-action records.

It is not that those systems do not contain the right information, it is that finding the right piece of it, across multiple systems and millions of records, can take too long, Lauderdale explained. Plant-specific information remains separate from the fleetwide platform, which focuses on shared industry resources.

Governance and Traceability

Traceability is a fundamental design principle for the system. Every response NIVA generates is grounded in underlying industry content and includes inline citations that link directly back to the source records. Users can follow these citations to verify information for themselves.

Lauderdale emphasized that the system maintains strict boundaries. NIVA has no path to plant control systems, does not touch safety-related equipment, and does not approve any actions. It serves as an input to existing human-controlled processes. Licensed operators, qualified engineers, and plant management retain full authority over all decisions and actions.

"Everything we build keeps human expertise at the heart of it," Lauderdale said. NIVA finds and organizes information, but it's people who decide, and people who act.

Industry Collaboration and Future Applications

The platform was developed in collaboration with INPO, EPRI, and NEI. Constellation, which operates one of the largest nuclear fleets in the United States, served as an important early adopter during development. Lauderdale argued that a utility-by-utility approach would not solve the industry's knowledge fragmentation problem. An industrywide layer was necessary to allow collective knowledge to be searched together.

The launch coincides with nuclear operators pursuing license extensions, uprates, reactor restarts, and other projects across the existing fleet. Lauderdale suggested the same underlying architecture could eventually support work on license renewals, advanced reactor licensing, and new nuclear construction. For now, the company's measure of success is straightforward. It will look for nuclear professionals spending less time searching and more time on the operational work that keeps plants running safely.