Key Takeaways
- Atomic Canyon, EPRI, INPO, and NEI announced on August 18, 2026 that the Nuclear Industry Virtual Assistant (NIVA) has moved from a pilot into fleetwide deployment across the North American nuclear fleet.
- NIVA is now available to every commercial nuclear plant that belongs to INPO, EPRI, and NEI, which the four organizations call the first AI platform offered fleetwide to the industry.
- Constellation Energy, which operates 26 reactors across six states, served as the testing ground during NIVA’s six-month pilot.
- The platform pairs a Knowledge Assistant, which answers plain-language questions with source citations, with an Operating Experience Assistant that surfaces related operating history; a troubleshooting feature is set for a targeted pilot later in 2026.
- Atomic Canyon has raised new funding from NVIDIA, Plug and Play Ventures, and former Vanguard CEO Mortimer Buckley.
Atomic Canyon’s NIVA Reaches Fleetwide Deployment
Atomic Canyon, EPRI, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO), and the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) said on August 18, 2026 that the Nuclear Industry Virtual Assistant, known as NIVA, has moved from a pilot program into deployment across the North American nuclear fleet. The AI platform is now open to every commercial nuclear plant that belongs to INPO, EPRI, and NEI, which the four organizations describe as the first such rollout offered fleetwide to the industry.
How the Virtual Assistant Works
NIVA combines two tools. A Knowledge Assistant lets plant staff ask plain-language questions and receive responses grounded in source documents, with inline citations. An Operating Experience Assistant reads the meaning and context behind a query to surface related operating history from across the fleet. Atomic Canyon plans a targeted pilot of a troubleshooting feature later in 2026.
“The fleetwide availability of NIVA shows that AI in nuclear power is real, operational, and ready to be deployed responsibly at a fleetwide scale,” said Trey Lauderdale, Founder and CEO of Atomic Canyon.
Constellation Energy Served as the Pilot’s Testing Ground
Constellation Energy, which operates 26 reactors across six states, tested the platform during NIVA’s six-month pilot ahead of the fleetwide launch. EPRI, INPO, and NEI worked with Atomic Canyon on developing and rolling out the tool to their member plants.
“NIVA demonstrates how collaborative innovation can help transform decades of operating experience and technical expertise into actionable insights,” said Steve Swilley, Vice President of Nuclear and Chief Nuclear Officer at EPRI.
Atomic Canyon Ties the Rollout to Nuclear’s Role in Powering AI
NEI President and CEO Maria Korsnick connected the launch to the broader relationship between nuclear power and AI growth. “Nuclear energy is uniquely positioned to enable the rapid growth of artificial intelligence by providing the clean, always-on power needed. Likewise, AI technologies like NIVA are helping modernize how the industry applies its decades of operational knowledge and expertise to strengthen our ability to license, operate, and maintain plants safely and efficiently for the long term,” she said.
Atomic Canyon’s Neutron Platform, which underpins NIVA, runs on FERMI, a family of nuclear domain-specific sentence embedding models the company built with Oak Ridge National Laboratory on the Frontier exascale supercomputer. Atomic Canyon has also raised new funding from NVIDIA, Plug and Play Ventures, and former Vanguard CEO Mortimer Buckley.
