The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and artificial intelligence company Atomic Canyon signed a memorandum of understanding to streamline the licensing process for nuclear power plants with artificial intelligence for license application reviews.

The agreement, signed during the Nuclear Opportunities Workshop (NOW) held at the Knoxville Convention Center, outlines their shared intentions 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 United States has established ambitious new deadlines for licensing reactor designs and commissioning new nuclear power plants. Meeting these targets requires public-private partnerships with leading companies innovating in both energy and AI to deliver the solutions the

“ORNL was critical to the development of nuclear energy more than 75 years ago, and we are committed to advancing the technologies needed to sustain and grow the nation’s nuclear capacity today,” said ORNL Director Stephen Streiffer. “The time is now. With new capabilities enabled by AI and partners like Atomic Canyon, we can help the nuclear industry unleash American energy.”

With a legacy rooted in the Manhattan Project, ORNL is home to DOE Office of Science user facilities including the High Flux Isotope Reactor and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, which houses the Frontier supercomputer; and other world-leading facilities for applied energy sciences. This combination enables companies like Atomic Canyon to access cutting-edge tools for simulation, digital qualification, materials development and component testing.

“We’re entering into a new, radically more advanced era of nuclear power, and the demand for steady-state energy consumption is growing rapidly,” said Tom Evans, ORNL’s lead scientist on the project. “Agreements like this are exactly how we can meet those demands through innovative approaches that accelerate the process by which nuclear power is brought to the grid.” 

Using ORNL’s Frontier, the world’s first exascale supercomputer, Atomic Canyon developed novel AI models designed specifically for the nuclear industry called FERMI, which powers Atomic Canyon’s Neutron AI platform. FERMI models enable intelligent search capabilities, allowing users to quickly locate relevant documents across vast repositories of technical documentation.