Spain Successfully Develops AI Early Warning System for Algae at Nuclear Power Plants

Recently, Spanish energy services group GDES and the Asociación Nuclear Ascó-Vandellós II (ANAV) jointly announced that the two parties have successfully developed an artificial intelligence (AI)-based early warning system named “iAlgae”. The system is designed to monitor in real time the accumulation of planktonic vegetation and algae at the cooling water intake of nuclear power plants, marking an important breakthrough in O&M technology for nuclear facilities to cope with natural environmental interference.

For power generation facilities that use natural surface water for cooling, the accumulation of algae and planktonic vegetation at water intakes is a common natural challenge. The iAlgae system combines multispectral cameras, advanced thermal imaging technology and visible-spectrum cameras, and relies on an edge computing architecture to process massive image data, achieving 24-hour continuous monitoring of the plant's water intake channel. The system's built-in AI algorithms can automatically identify moving vegetation clusters and generate real-time alerts, thereby guiding the operations team to carry out timely cleaning work.

This innovative technology has undergone 144 days of rigorous testing in a real operating environment at the Ascó Nuclear Power Plant in Spain. During this period, the system processed more than 1 million images in total, automatically detected 710 algae clusters, and successfully identified many small vegetation accumulations of less than 1 square meter that are difficult to detect by traditional manual visual inspection. The test results fully verified the system's stable performance under various harsh environmental conditions, including heavy rainfall, dense fog, drastic lighting changes, strong winds and turbulent water flow.

GDES stated that the next phase of the project will focus on advancing the industrialization and mass production of the solution and further expanding its automation functions. The Ascó Nuclear Power Plant consists of two Siemens/Westinghouse-designed pressurized water reactors (PWRs). The successful deployment of the iAlgae system provides an excellent practical example for the global nuclear power industry to use digital tools to enhance system reliability and proactively avoid environmental risks.