Diablo Canyon, California’s sole remaining nuclear power plant, has been left for dead on more than a few occasions over the last decade or so, and is currently slated to begin a lengthy decommissioning process in 2029. Despite its tenuous existence, the San Luis Obispo power plant received some serious computing hardware at the end of last year: eight NVIDIA H100s, which are among the world’s mightiest graphical processors. Their purpose is to power a brand-new artificial intelligence tool designed for the nuclear energy industry.
Pacific Gas & Electric, which runs Diablo Canyon, announced a deal with artificial intelligence startup Atomic Canyon—a company also based in San Luis Obispo—around the same time, heralding it in a press release as “the first on-site generative AI deployment at a U.S. nuclear power plant.”
For now, the artificial intelligence tool named Neutron Enterprise is just meant to help workers at the plant navigate extensive technical reports and regulations — millions of pages of intricate documents from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that go back decades — while they operate and maintain the facility. But Neutron Enterprise’s very existence opens the door to further use of AI at Diablo Canyon or other facilities — a possibility that has some lawmakers and AI experts calling for more guardrails.
PG&E is deploying the document retrieval service in stages. The installation of the NVIDIA chips was one of the first phases of the partnership between PG&E and Atomic Canyon; PG&E is forecasting a “full deployment” at Diablo Canyon by the third quarter of this year, said Maureen Zawalick, the company’s vice president of business and technical services. At that point, Neutron Enterprise—which Zawalick likens to a data-mining “copilot,” though explicitly not a “decision-maker”—will be expanded to search for and summarize Diablo Canyon-specific instructions and reports too.
“We probably spend about 15,000 hours a year searching through our multiple databases and records and procedures,” Zawalick said. “And that’s going to shrink that time way down.”
Trey Lauderdale, the chief executive and co-founder of Atomic Canyon, told CalMatters his aim for Neutron Enterprise is simple and low-stakes: he wants Diablo Canyon employees to be able to look up pertinent information more efficiently. “You can put this on the record: the AI guy in nuclear says there is no way in hell I want AI running my nuclear power plant right now,” Lauderdale said.
That “right now” qualifier is key, though. PG&E and Atomic Canyon are on the same page about sticking to limited AI uses for the foreseeable future, but they aren’t foreclosing the possibility of eventually increasing AI’s presence at the plant in yet-to-be-determined ways. According to Lauderdale, his company is also in talks with other nuclear facilities, as well as groups who are interested in building out small modular reactor facilities, about how to integrate his startup’s technology. And he’s not the only entrepreneur eyeing ways to introduce artificial intelligence into the nuclear energy field.
In the meantime, questions remain about whether sufficient safeguards exist to regulate the combination of two technologies that each have potential for harm. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was exploring the issue of AI in nuclear plants for a few years, but it’s unclear if that will remain a priority under the Trump administration. Days into his current term, Trump revoked a Biden administration executive order that set out AI regulatory goals, writing that they acted “as barriers to American AI innovation.” For now, Atomic Canyon is voluntarily keeping the Nuclear Regulatory Commission abreast of its plans.
Tamara Kneese, the director of tech policy nonprofit Data & Society’s Climate, Technology, and Justice program, conceded that for a narrowly designed document retrieval service, “AI can be helpful in terms of efficiency.” But she cautioned, “The idea that you could just use generative AI for one specific kind of task at the nuclear power plant and then call it a day, I don’t really trust that it would stop there. And trusting PG&E to safely use generative AI in a nuclear setting is something that is deserving of more scrutiny.”
For those reasons, Democratic Assemblymember Dawn Addis—who represents San Luis Obispo—isn’t enthused about the latest developments at Diablo Canyon. “I have many unanswered questions of the safety, oversight, and job implications for using AI at Diablo,” Addis said. “Previously, I have supported measures to regulate AI and prevent the replacement and automation of jobs. We need those guardrails in place, especially if we are to use them at highly sensitive sites like Diablo Canyon.”
How AI came to SLO
Before Lauderdale moved into artificial intelligence and nuclear energy, he founded a health care software company called Voalte, which was designed to help hospital staff communicate over iPhones, reducing their reliance on loudspeaker paging and desktop computer systems. At the time, circa 2008, Lauderdale said his pitch was met with worries and resistance from hospital staff. He likes to draw parallels between that experience, which culminated in 2019 when he sold his company to a hospital bed manufacturer for $180 million, and the pushback he’s heard about Atomic Canyon.
In 2021, Lauderdale moved to San Luis Obispo so he, his wife, and kids could be closer to his wife’s family in Northern California. Lauderdale told CalMatters he didn’t realize how close Diablo Canyon was to his new home until after he relocated. It was through meeting Diablo Canyon workers out in the community, he says, that he learned more about nuclear energy and landed on his next startup idea.
Atomic Canyon launched in 2023 with a task of downloading roughly 53 million pages of publicly available Nuclear Regulatory Commission documents, which encapsulate all of America’s nuclear energy fleet and are available on a database called ADAMS. That process started around January 2024, after Lauderdale gave the Nuclear Regulatory Commission a heads-up about what Atomic Canyon was planning to do: “I reached out to [the commission] just to say, hey, I’m Trey Lauderdale, American citizen, entrepreneur. We’re going to start building AI in the nuclear space, and we just wanted to make sure the NRC was aware that when they see all these downloads, it’s not a foreign actor or someone trying to do anything bad to their system.”
Lauderdale said the commission supported Atomic Canyon’s efforts. After downloading the data, Atomic Canyon partnered with the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee to kick off research and development. The lab houses the Frontier supercomputer, which was the world’s fastest when it debuted two years ago. Atomic Canyon used Frontier to build a form of AI that can perform “sentence-embedding models,” which Lauderdale says are capable of processing nuclear jargon and are less likely to “hallucinate,”or answer a question using fabrications.
“You basically teach the artificial intelligence how to understand nuclear words, their context, what different acronyms mean,” he said.
In the spring of 2024, Lauderdale and PG&E representatives kicked off formal discussions about how Atomic Canyon could be of use at Diablo Canyon. PG&E soon invited Atomic Canyon staff to visit the nuclear facility, where they shadowed employees for a few weeks, “observing where there were operational inefficiencies that we could try to target with AI,” Lauderdale said.
Then, in September 2024, Atomic Canyon announced the completion of testing on its AI, referred to as “FERMI”; these models, which are open-source, are what collectively make up the Neutron Enterprise software. A few months later, in November, came the first-of-its-kind announcement with PG&E.
