Nuclear power is back. And this time AI can help manage the reactors.

Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limit all rights reserved. Belle Lin, The Wall Street Journal 3 min Read April 11, 2025, 06:13 PM IST Today, almost all the country’s 94 industry nuclear reactors have extended their licenses, and together still offer almost 20% of US electricity. (Reuters) Summary Argonne National Lab has an AI-based tool that can help design and operate nuclear reactors-in a time in which AI itself feeds a powerful insanity. A revival in nuclear power – partly fed by a noisy question of data centers for artificial intelligence – leads to a greater interest in utilizing AI to make these core plants more effective. According to Richard Vilim, a senior nuclear engineer in the Richard Vilim division, the Energy Department’s Argonne National Laboratory, based in Lemont, ill. And known for its work on nuclear reactors, an AI-based instrument develops. Argonne’s instrument called the parameter-free reasoning operator for automatic identification and diagnosis, or pro-aid, is a technological jump in a field that she saw high in the last quarter of the 20th century. “The nuclear plants were built more than 30 years ago,” Vilim said, “it’s a kind of dinosaurs when it comes to technology.” Almost all the country’s 94 operating reactors have extended their licenses, and together still offer almost 20% of US electricity. Their average age is about 42, according to the US Energy Information Administration. Argonne’s plan is to provide pro-aid to new, technical forward core building, but it also looks at the so-called dinosaurs, some of which are raised by companies such as Amazon and Microsoft to stimulate their AI data centers. The global pressure on AI will attract a sharp increase in electricity demand, with the consumption of data centers that are expected to be more than doubled by the end of the decade, the international energy agency said on Thursday. The owners of about a third of the US nuclear plants are in talks with technical companies to provide electricity for those data centers, the Wall Street Journal reported. Pro-AID performs real-time monitoring and diagnostics using generative AI combined with large language models that notify staff and explain when something looks wrong with a plant. It also uses a form of automatic reasoning – which uses mathematical logic to encode knowledge in AI systems – to imitate the way a human operator asks questions and understand how the plant works, Vilim said. The tool can also help improve the effectiveness of staff needed to operate a nuclear plant, Vilim said. This is especially important because older employees leave the workforce. “If we can hand over some of these lower -level functions to a machine, if someone retires, you don’t have to replace him or her,” he said. Compared to gas-powered plants-which are newer and are more automatic with digital monitoring tools-the technology at nuclear plants far behind, Vilim added. Part of the effectiveness in the update of technology comes from the consolidation of monitoring staff at the core plants of a utility on a single, centralized place-like that gas-powered plants already do. However, for legacy nuclear plants, it is not always clear that the technology is worth the cost, Vilim said. Pro-Aid, a tool that can be licensed to a software developer or core supplier, has not yet found its way to a commercial nuclear plant. Some power plants may want to update with technology, but it is also a challenge to pick up a long period of the network to upgrade it, says Bob Johnson, an analyst at Market Research and IT consultation firm Gartner. ‘The aid programs are confronted:’ Is there sufficient value to put it in? Or do we have what we need, and we just go to the finish line, which is only 20 years away? “” Vilim said. Bill Gates-formed Terrapower, one of a newer generation of nuclear businesses, has been using advanced computer modeling to design its reactort technologies since the beginning in the early AUGHTS, the company said. Terrapower’s sodium reactor will be the first to be designed and modeled “from starting commercialization in a completely digital environment,” said Chris Levesque, the president and CEO of the company. The Sam Altman-backed Nuclear Start Oklo uses AI to do design analysis on the reactors. With the help of these instruments, it is possible to reduce the amount of time needed to perform simulation matters with high fidelity, said Jacob Dewitte, Oklo’s co -founder and CEO. Still, it will take time for AI to fully get into commercial nuclear power, he said. “It’s a big accelerator, it’s a massive productivity prelifier,” Dewitte said. “But to be candid, I think that core is really early in the days of this.” Write to Belle Lin at [email protected], capture all the industry news, bank news and updates on live currency. Download the Mint News app to get daily market updates. More Topics #Nuclear Power #Artificial Intelligence Mint Special