{"id":672024,"date":"2025-05-28T16:00:45","date_gmt":"2025-05-28T13:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/atomic-canyon-wants-to-be-chatgpt-for-the-nuclear-industry\/"},"modified":"2025-05-28T16:00:45","modified_gmt":"2025-05-28T13:00:45","slug":"atomic-canyon-wants-to-be-chatgpt-for-the-nuclear-industry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/atomic-canyon-wants-to-be-chatgpt-for-the-nuclear-industry\/","title":{"rendered":"Atomic Canyon wants to be ChatGPT for the nuclear industry"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Tech companies are betting heavily that nuclear power can help deliver the electricity they need to realize their AI plans. But data centers need power tomorrow, and the nuclear industry isn\u2019t known for its speed.<\/p>\n

Trey Lauderdale thinks AI can give nuclear the speed that it needs. <\/p>\n

Lauderdale\u2019s obsession with nuclear started close to home. In San Luis Obispo, California, where he lives, he kept running into people who worked at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant. \u201cThey\u2019re like the coaches of our flag football team,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

In talking with them, he learned that nuclear power plants are swimming in documents. Diablo Canyon, near Lauderdale\u2019s home in San Luis Obispo, has around 2 billion pages worth, he said. Lauderdale, a serial healthcare entrepreneur, had a hunch that AI could help the nuclear industry tame its paper problem.<\/p>\n

Lauderdale founded Atomic Canyon<\/a> a little over a year and a half ago, initially funding it with his own money. The startup uses AI to help engineers, maintenance technicians, and compliance officers find the documents they need.<\/p>\n

The startup landed a deal with Diablo Canyon in late 2024. Lauderdale said the deal led to inquiries from other nuclear power companies. \u201cThat\u2019s when I knew, as an entrepreneur, we were at a point where we needed to raise a round of capital.\u201d<\/p>\n

Atomic Canyon closed a $7 million seed round led by the Energy Impact Partners, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. Participating investors include Commonweal Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures, Tower Research Ventures, Wischoff Ventures, and previous angel investors.<\/p>\n

When Atomic Canyon first started, its AI engineers tested various models with underwhelming results. \u201cWe quickly realized the AI hallucinates when it sees these nuclear words,\u201d Lauderdale said. \u201cIt hasn\u2019t seen enough examples of the acronyms.\u201d<\/p>\n

But building a new AI model requires massive computing power. So Lauderdale talked his way into a meeting with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which conducts nuclear research and also happ<\/a>ens to have the world\u2019s second fastest supercomputer. The lab was intrigued by the idea and awarded Atomic Canyon 20,000 GPU hours worth of compute.<\/p>\n

Atomic Canyon\u2019s models use sentence embedding, which is particularly suited to indexing documents. It tasks them with making a nuclear power plant\u2019s documents searchable using retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG. RAG uses large language models to create responses to queries, but it requires the LLMs to refer to specific documents in an effort to reduce hallucination.<\/p>\n

For now, Atomic Canyon is sticking to document search, in part because the stakes are lower. <\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the reasons we\u2019re starting generative work around the titles of documents is because getting that wrong might cause someone a little frustration. It doesn\u2019t put anyone at risk at the plant,\u201d Lauderdale said.<\/p>\n

Eventually, Lauderdale envisions Atomic Canyon\u2019s AI creating \u201ca first round draft\u201d of documents, complete with references. \u201cYou are always going to have a human in the loop here,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Lauderdale didn\u2019t put a timeline on that effort, though. Search is \u201cthe foundational layer,\u201d he said. \u201cYou have to nail the search.\u201d Plus, given the number of documents in the nuclear industry, \u201cwe have a long runway in search alone,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tech companies are betting heavily that nuclear power can help deliver the electricity they need to realize their AI plans. But data centers need power tomorrow, and the nuclear industry isn\u2019t known for its speed. Trey Lauderdale thinks AI can give nuclear the speed that it needs. Lauderdale\u2019s obsession with nuclear started close to home….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":672027,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/GettyImages-487821.jpeg?resize=1200,792","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[77337,77143,156257,61594,74839,156718,156258,76151,156719,156720],"class_list":["post-672024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-ai","tag-climate","tag-energy-impact-partners","tag-exclusive","tag-fundraising","tag-large-language-models","tag-nuclear-fission","tag-nuclear-power","tag-plug-and-play-ventures","tag-wischoff-ventures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672024\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/672027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}