Nuclear Industry Virtual Assistant (NIVA) moves from a successful pilot to fleetwide deployment across the North American nuclear fleet
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif., Aug. 18, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Atomic Canyon, the developer of AI tools for the nuclear energy industry, today announced the fleetwide availability of the Nuclear Industry Virtual Assistant (NIVA). Developed alongside collaborators including the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO), EPRI, and the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), NIVA represents the first artificial intelligence platform of its kind accessible to commercial nuclear power plants that are members of INPO, EPRI, and NEI.
Leveraging leadership and staff input from industry groups and plants across the North American nuclear fleet, the fleetwide deployment marks a milestone for the North American nuclear industry. NIVA’s launch moves artificial intelligence from pilot validation into scaled operational use across one of the most important critical infrastructure sectors.
NIVA is designed specifically for the nuclear industry, helping nuclear professionals more quickly find, synthesize, and apply knowledge across complex technical, regulatory, and operational workflows with grounded responses and inline citations to source records. NIVA currently has two core use cases that have been piloted over the past six months, with new features, modules, and datasets planned to further evolve NIVA’s functionality. NIVA’s initial capabilities focus on three areas:
- Knowledge Assistant enables users to ask questions in plain language and receive responses grounded in industry content, reducing time spent searching and supporting faster, informed decisions.
- Operating Experience (OE) Assistant surfaces relevant OE by analyzing meaning and context — not just keywords — and lets users chat directly with the results to ask follow-up questions and dig deeper into what they find
- Troubleshooting (in development) will guide users through technical questions using vetted information, supporting timely and informed responses. Pilot is targeted for later this year.
“This is a defining moment for the nuclear industry,” said Trey Lauderdale, Founder and CEO of Atomic Canyon. “The U.S. nuclear sector sits on decades of invaluable technical and operational knowledge, but too much of that knowledge remains difficult to access at the speed modern deployments require. The fleetwide availability of NIVA shows that AI in nuclear power is real, operational, and ready to be deployed responsibly at a fleetwide scale.”
Alongside the fleetwide deployment, Atomic Canyon has raised new funding from NVIDIA, Plug and Play Ventures and Mortimer (“Tim”) Buckley, the former chairman and CEO of The Vanguard Group.
By accelerating access to important operational information, such as the INPO Operating Experience platform, NIVA end users have already started to see benefits from the platform’s enhanced search and generative capabilities.
End users of NIVA include Constellation Energy, whose portfolio includes 26 nuclear reactors across six states and generates one-third of the nation’s clean nuclear power. The company’s scale made it a critical proving ground for AI tools designed to standardize knowledge access and support workforce continuity across distributed operations.
"The nuclear industry has built decades of knowledge and operating experience," said Frank Sturniolo, Senior Vice President of Governance & Oversight for Constellation. "As Constellation helps power the growth of AI, we're also exploring how AI tools can help our employees more easily access and apply that expertise to strengthen operations, support knowledge transfer and improve workforce effectiveness. We're pleased to work with industry partners to make this information more accessible to the people who need it most."
NIVA is built specifically to understand the language, workflows, and knowledge environments of nuclear power leveraging Atomic Canyon’s FERMI AI models for nuclear specific information retrieval. Unlike general-purpose AI tools, the platform is designed for the unique demands of highly regulated, high-consequence industries, where trust, precision, and domain relevance are essential.
"The nuclear industry's ability to meet today's challenges and tomorrow's opportunities depends on effectively capturing, sharing, and applying knowledge across the fleet," said Steve Swilley, vice president of Nuclear and chief nuclear officer at EPRI. "NIVA demonstrates how collaborative innovation can help transform decades of operating experience and technical expertise into actionable insights. By combining industry knowledge with advanced AI capabilities, we can help accelerate knowledge transfer, support workforce effectiveness, and advance safe, reliable, and efficient nuclear operations."
By helping make decades of complex information more accessible and actionable, NIVA is designed to preserve and democratize nuclear knowledge for the current workforce and the next generation of industry professionals.
“It’s two sides of the same coin. Nuclear energy is uniquely positioned to enable the rapid growth of artificial intelligence by providing the clean, always-on power needed,” said Maria Korsnick, president and CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute. “Likewise, AI technologies like NIVA are helping modernize how the industry applies its decades of operational knowledge and expertise to strengthen our ability to license, operate, and maintain plants safely and efficiently for the long term.”
“Operational excellence in nuclear energy depends on the ability of nuclear professionals to access and apply the right knowledge at the right time,” said Jeff Place, EVP, Industry Strategy and Chief Nuclear Officer of INPO. “Technologies that responsibly strengthen knowledge access and workforce effectiveness can play an important role in supporting long-term safety and reliability across the industry and sustained, high performance.”
About Atomic Canyon
Atomic Canyon builds AI solutions for the nuclear energy industry. The company's Neutron Platform combines nuclear-specific enterprise search and generative AI tools. Both are powered by FERMI, a family of nuclear domain-specific sentence embedding models developed with Oak Ridge National Laboratory on the Frontier exascale supercomputer. Nuclear professionals across the industry use Neutron today, including at PG&E's Diablo Canyon and through the Nuclear Industry Virtual Assistant (NIVA), developed in collaboration with the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO), EPRI, and the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), for the entire North American operating fleet. Atomic Canyon's collaborators also include the U.S. Department of Energy (Idaho National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Learn more at atomic-canyon.com.
Media Contact: atomiccanyon@launchsquad.com
