NIVA, the Nuclear Industry Virtual Assistant, is now available across the North American commercial nuclear fleet. Developed in collaboration with the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO), EPRI, and the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), it is the first AI platform of its kind open to the commercial nuclear plants that belong to these organizations.
We’re proud of this one, and glad to share it with the industry. NIVA was built with INPO, EPRI, and NEI, and shaped by the leadership and staff of nuclear plants across the fleet. That collaboration was the point from the start. The people who run these plants helped build the tool they’d be using.
It moves AI in nuclear from pilot testing into everyday operational use, and it does so on the industry’s terms: every answer is grounded in real records, with inline citations that plant professionals can check for themselves.
“This is a defining moment for the nuclear industry. 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.”
Trey Lauderdale, Founder & CEO, Atomic Canyon
What we built
NIVA helps nuclear professionals find and apply knowledge buried in technical, regulatory, and operational records. Two assistants anchor the launch, with more on the way:
- Knowledge Assistant: ask questions in plain language and get answers grounded in industry content, from NRC Reg Guides and NUREGs to NEI guidance, INPO standards, and EPRI technical reports.
- Operating Experience (OE) Assistant: surfaces relevant operating experience by meaning and context, not just keywords, then lets you chat directly with the results to dig deeper.
A Troubleshooting assistant is in development, with a pilot targeted for later this year.
Powered by Neutron and FERMI
NIVA runs on the technology Atomic Canyon built for the industry: Neutron, our AI workbench for nuclear professionals, and FERMI, our family of nuclear domain-specific AI models.
FERMI is the retrieval engine. Trained on more than 53 million pages of U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission data with Oak Ridge National Laboratory on the Frontier exascale supercomputer (and open source on Hugging Face), it understands nuclear terminology, acronyms, and context in ways general-purpose AI cannot. That is what lets NIVA surface the right record instead of a keyword match.
Neutron is the platform those capabilities live in. NIVA puts them to work across the collective knowledge of the industry; Neutron brings the same purpose-built AI tools inside the plant, connected to a station’s own licensing basis, procedures, maintenance history, and engineering records.
The full story of how NIVA came together (the problem, the design decisions, and what it looks like in the field) is in our NIVA customer story.
Proven across the fleet
Before going fleetwide, NIVA’s assistants were piloted across the industry for six months. Early adopters include Constellation Energy, which operates 21 reactors across 12 plants and generates roughly a third of the nation’s clean nuclear power. That scale made it a demanding test for tools meant to give every site the same fast access to knowledge.
“The nuclear industry has built decades of knowledge and operating experience. 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.”
Frank Sturniolo, Senior Vice President, Governance & Oversight, Constellation
Our collaborators across the industry share that conviction.
“Operational excellence in nuclear energy depends on the ability of nuclear professionals to access and apply the right knowledge at the right time. Technologies that responsibly strengthen knowledge access can play an important role in supporting long-term safety and reliability across the industry.”
Jeff Place, EVP, Industry Strategy & Chief Nuclear Officer, INPO
“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.”
Steve Swilley, Vice President of Nuclear & Chief Nuclear Officer, EPRI
“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.”
Maria Korsnick, President & CEO, Nuclear Energy Institute
What comes next
Alongside the fleetwide launch, we’ve raised new funding from NVIDIA, Plug and Play Ventures, and Mortimer (“Tim”) Buckley, former chairman and CEO of The Vanguard Group. The capital helps us scale deployment and keep expanding what NIVA can do.
We built Atomic Canyon around nuclear. We trained our own models with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, deployed the first on-site generative AI system at a U.S. nuclear plant at PG&E’s Diablo Canyon, and spent years learning how plant professionals actually work before we wrote a line of code for NIVA. Bringing it to every plant across the fleet is what comes next, and the goal is still the same: less time searching, more time doing the work that keeps plants running safely.
Want to see how it works? Read the NIVA customer story, explore Neutron and FERMI, or get in touch.