NuScale Power, the company behind the only small modular reactor design ever certified by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, is betting that artificial intelligence can shave years off the slow, document-heavy process of building nuclear plants.
The company announced a partnership with Nuclearn and Nuclear Promise X (NPX) to develop AI tools tailored specifically for reactor engineering, licensing data, and internal knowledge management. Early proof-of-concept testing showed an 80% reduction in the time it takes engineers to retrieve critical information. In an industry where a single licensing review can consume millions of pages of documentation, that kind of efficiency gain is less “nice to have” and more “existential advantage.”
What NuScale is actually building
The partnership centers on Nuclearn’s AtomAssist platform, which runs on language models trained specifically on nuclear engineering data rather than the general-purpose large language models powering consumer chatbots.
That distinction matters. General-purpose AI tools tend to hallucinate, which is a quirky feature when you’re writing a poem and a catastrophic liability when you’re designing a nuclear reactor. NuScale’s approach keeps all AI-generated outputs fully traceable to controlled documentation, meaning every answer the system produces can be traced back to a verified source document that meets regulatory standards.
