South Korea Deeply Integrates 50 Years of Nuclear Power Design Experience with Artificial Intelligence

KEPCO E&C has deeply integrated its 50 years of accumulated technology and data in the nuclear power design field with artificial intelligence (AI), and its “digital transformation” strategy is being comprehensively accelerated.

At the “2026 National Contribution Awards” ceremony, KEPCO E&C received the Minister of Trade, Industry and Energy Award in the AI innovation category. This award aims to recognize the company's outstanding achievements in organically combining nuclear power design experience with technical materials and successfully applying them to business innovation and safety management technology R&D in the power generation and energy sectors.

Among the most notable achievements is “NEXA,” an autonomous generative AI platform developed specifically for power plant design. The platform ensures that nuclear power technical information and design materials can be efficiently utilized in a highly secure network environment, and it is currently widely used for the retrieval and analysis of technical materials as well as the precise translation of specialized terminology in nuclear power and engineering plants.

In August of this year, the company upgraded the platform to the more powerful “NEXA 3.0.” Through the official launch of the “NEXA CODE” feature, which allows code to be written and modified using natural language commands alone, the scope of AI application has been further expanded from the pure design field to comprehensive business management across the entire company.

In addition, KEPCO E&C has deeply introduced AI technology into the small modular reactor (SMR) field. The company is currently building an “SMR AI Design Platform” aimed at converting standard design and construction-optimized design results into an intelligent database. In the future, this platform will serve the comprehensive design and compliance verification of domestic and international SMR projects.

At the same time, the company is also actively promoting the development of power plant safety management technology based on AI and digital twin (Digital Twin) technology, and is collaborating with SK AX to jointly explore AI transformation tasks in the power generation and energy industries.

Kim Tae-kyun, President of KEPCO E&C, stated that the core of AI transformation lies not only in introducing new technologies, but also in converting long-accumulated expertise and data into high-quality results that are trustworthy on site. The company will continue to transform its rich design experience into intelligent assets to comprehensively enhance the core competitiveness of its nuclear power and future energy businesses.