Atomic Canyon, in partnership with EPRI, INPO, and NEI, Launches NIVA, a Virtual Assistant for the North American Nuclear Industry

Atomic Canyon, a company developing artificial intelligence tools for the nuclear energy industry, announced on August 18 that the Nuclear Industry Virtual Assistant (NIVA) has transitioned from the pilot phase to full deployment and will be rolled out to nuclear power plants across North America. The platform was developed by Atomic Canyon in collaboration with the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO), the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), and the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), and is available to commercial nuclear power plants that are members of these organizations.

NIVA is positioned as an AI platform dedicated to the nuclear power industry, primarily designed to help nuclear professionals find, integrate, and apply industry knowledge more quickly across complex workflows involving technical, regulatory, and operational management tasks. When answering questions, the platform provides fact-based information with embedded citations that link to original records, allowing users to verify sources.

According to the company, NIVA has developed two core applications that have been piloted over the past six months. Its "Knowledge Assistant" feature allows users to ask questions in natural language and generates answers based on industry materials, reducing the time spent searching for information. The "Operating Experience Assistant" filters relevant operating experience by analyzing semantics and context rather than relying solely on keyword matching, and users can continue to ask follow-up questions about the search results. The platform is also developing a troubleshooting feature, with a pilot planned for later this year, which will provide guidance for resolving technical issues based on verified information.

Atomic Canyon stated that the full deployment of NIVA marks the transition of AI applications in the nuclear power sector from pilot validation to scaled operational use. The company's founder and CEO, Trey Lauderdale, noted that the U.S. nuclear energy industry has accumulated decades of technical and operational knowledge, but much of it remains difficult to access quickly at the pace of modern work. The deployment of NIVA demonstrates that AI tools can now be responsibly applied across nuclear power plants.

Constellation Energy is one of NIVA's end users. The company operates 26 nuclear reactors across six U.S. states, generating approximately one-third of the nation's clean nuclear power. Frank Stancilolo, Constellation Energy's Senior Vice President of Governance and Regulation, said the company is exploring ways to use AI tools to help employees access and apply specialized knowledge more easily, supporting operational management, knowledge transfer, and workforce efficiency.

NIVA is built on Atomic Canyon's FERMI AI model, designed for domain-specific information retrieval in the nuclear power sector. Atomic Canyon stated that, unlike general-purpose AI tools, the platform is designed for highly regulated and safety-critical industries, with a strong emphasis on trustworthiness, accuracy, and domain relevance.

Alongside the full platform deployment, Atomic Canyon also secured a new round of funding from investors including NVIDIA, Plug and Play Ventures, and Mortimer "Tim" Buckley, former Chairman and CEO of Vanguard. The company said NIVA will continue to expand with new features, modules, and datasets to support the preservation, sharing, and application of knowledge in the nuclear power industry.