The U.S. nuclear industry is adopting artificial intelligence to address a difficult combination of aging reactors, extensive regulatory requirements, and a shrinking specialized workforce. Rather than controlling reactors, current AI systems help engineers and plant personnel find information and manage the enormous volume of documentation required to operate nuclear facilities safely, tells IEEE Spectrum.
Atomic Canyon’s Nuclear Industry Virtual Assistant, or NIVA, is one example. Developed with nuclear industry organizations and pilot-tested at Constellation Energy plants, NIVA is now available across the U.S. reactor fleet. Another company, Nuclearn, says its AI products are working with more than 65 U.S. partners.
Documentation is an obvious target for automation. Nuclear plants maintain extensive records covering regulatory compliance, maintenance, engineering decisions, equipment histories, and previous incidents. AI assistants can search these repositories, retrieve relevant technical information, and help workers understand how similar problems were addressed previously.
Atomic Canyon trained nuclear-specific models using 53 million pages of publicly available Nuclear Regulatory Commission data. The objective is to understand specialized nuclear terminology and make decades of operational knowledge easier to search. Industry organizations have also worked to unify previously scattered datasets covering maintenance, safety, and operating experience.
A nuclear engineer investigating a large cooling pump, for example, could use AI to examine maintenance guides and thousands of incident reports from other plants. Importantly, the system should identify the documentation behind its recommendations so engineers can verify the information themselves.
Security remains critical. Some AI systems keep plant information on-site, while access to protected databases continues to follow existing security requirements.
AI could eventually assist with tasks such as analyzing inspection data and flagging potentially problematic welds. However, industry developers do not expect autonomous AI to make reactor operating decisions. Human oversight remains central because nuclear operations demand regulatory accountability, technical verification, and extremely low tolerance for error.
