Amid all the hype about nuclear plants could do to power data centers for artificial intelligence, Trey Lauderdale wondered what AI could do for building and operating reactors. So, two years ago, he founded his startup Atomic Canyon to create large language model programs to help Diablo Canyon, the last nuclear plant in California, sort through its mountains of documents more easily.
In September, I broke news in Latitude Media about Atomic Canyon’s deal with the Idaho National Laboratory to work on national standards for assessing how well AI software served nuclear.
In a new exclusive for Heatmap this morning, I reported that the startup has now inked an agreement to take its work global with the International Atomic Energy Agency:
On Wednesday, Atomic Canyon is set to announce a partnership with the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency to begin cataloging the United Nations nuclear watchdog’s data and laying the groundwork for global standards of how AI software can be used in the industry.
“We’re going to start building proof of concepts and models together, and we’re going to build a framework of what the opportunities and use cases are for AI,” Lauderdale, Atomic Canyon’s chief executive, told me on a call from his hotel room in Vienna, Austria, where the IAEA is headquartered.
The memorandum of understanding between the company and the UN agency is at an early stage, so it’s as yet unclear what international standards or guidelines could look like.
In the U.S., Atomic Canyon began making inroads earlier this year with a project backed by the Institute of Nuclear Power Operators, the Nuclear Energy Institute, and the Electric Power Research Institute to create a virtual assistant for nuclear workers.
In the piece, I noted that AI for nuclear has been booming this year:
Atomic Canyon isn’t the only company applying AI to nuclear power. Last month, nuclear giant Westinghouse unveiled new software it’s designing with Google to calculate ways to bring down the cost of key components in reactors by millions of dollars. The Nuclear Company, a startup developer that’s aiming to build
Lauderdale doesn’t see that as competition.
“All of that, I view as complementary,” he said.
“There is so much wood to chop in the nuclear power space, the amount of work from an administrative perspective regarding every inch of the nuclear supply chain, from how we design reactors to how we license reactors, how we regulate to how we do environmental reviews, how we construct them to how we maintain,” he added. “Every aspect of the nuclear power life cycle is going to be transformed. There’s no way one company alone could come in and say, we have a magical approach. We’re going to need multiple players.”
Go over to Heatmap to read the entire piece, which — if I may be so bold — has much pithier lede than the one I used for this newsletter. You can read the full story here.
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