U.S. Nuclear Plants Turn to A.I., Mostly for Paperwork

A.I.’s first real foothold in U.S. nuclear power has been oddly unglamorous. The systems are being used to hunt through documents, sort defect reports and draft paperwork, while the reactors themselves stay firmly off-limits. According to IEEE Spectrum, nearly all 94 reactors in the United States have now been offered these tools, and most operators have accepted them.

That makes sense in a business where paper trails matter almost as much as hardware. Nuclear plants have to document every repair, every anomaly and every change for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. So the new software is being pointed at the bureaucratic pain points: Atomic Canyon’s Nuclear Industry Virtual Assistant, or NIVA, has been available across the North American fleet since August and was built with EPRI, INPO and NEI. It answers questions in plain language and cites the guidance, standards and technical reports it used. Another assistant searches operating experience, pulling from maintenance guides and tens of thousands of incident reports so engineers can check what happened elsewhere when something breaks.

The other uses are even more practical. Nuclearn categorizes condition reports and sends them to the right people; SJF Ventures says about half of the U.S. fleet uses it, and in one case it processed 87 percent of more than 38,000 reports automatically, saving more than 5,600 hours of engineering time. Other systems summarize long documents, draft evaluations and work plans, and in an EPRI pilot, A.I. flags anomalies in weld inspection data with a human reviewing every recommendation.

The most dramatic example is a licensing demo from the U.S. Energy Department, Microsoft and Everstar. There, A.I. turned a safety analysis for a new reactor type into 208 pages matching sections of an NRC license application in one day, not the usual four to six weeks. An expert still checked the result. That pattern runs through the whole story: A.I. is being used to speed up the tedious parts, while humans keep the final say.

And the caution is not subtle. Atomic Canyon says NIVA cannot touch plant systems, write to controls or approve anything. Nuclearn keeps each plant’s data on site. The training behind NIVA used more than 53 million pages of NRC documents on Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Frontier supercomputer. The industry sees an aging workforce and a coming nuclear buildout. Critics see a place where paperwork is safety work, and where a neat paragraph can still hide a dangerous mistake.