Most US Nuclear Plants Take Up AI Assistants, Kept Away From Plant Control

United States, Oct. 8 — Nearly the entire US fleet of 94 nuclear reactors has been offered AI assistants this year, and most plants have taken them up, IEEE Spectrum reports. The tools search regulatory, maintenance and incident records for engineers and stay out of plant operations.

The push comes from two sides. Technology companies that need electricity for data centers want a nuclear revival, and plant operators need help with aging equipment and a workforce that is shrinking faster than it can be replaced.

The Technical Details

In August, Atomic Canyon launched NIVA, the Nuclear Industry Virtual Assistant, after pilots at plants run by Constellation. It was built with industry groups and is now open to the whole US fleet. To train it, Atomic Canyon pulled 53 million pages of public Nuclear Regulatory Commission records and built nuclear-specific sentence-embedding models with Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Its data comes from unified datasets that the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and the Nuclear Energy Institute began building in 2025. A rival startup, Nuclearn, says it works with more than 65 US partners, including an integration with