NIVA rolls out technical search across North American nuclear stations

A question typed in conversational language can now reach a nuclear plant’s licensing records, maintenance logs, drawings and procedures. Atomic Canyon’s NIVA has begun rolling out across North American nuclear stations, giving engineers and technicians a way to search those archives with answers that include direct citations to the underlying documents.

The engine behind it is FERMI, a model family built for nuclear engineering’s dense terminology, abbreviations and technical syntax. Atomic Canyon worked with Oak Ridge National Laboratory to train it on the Frontier exascale supercomputer using more than 53 million pages of documentation from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Unlike a basic keyword search, FERMI is designed to interpret the technical meaning of a query. Its completed model weights are publicly available on Hugging Face.

NIVA runs through Neutron, the operational software environment that connects the models to each station’s private network. Its Knowledge Assistant draws on NRC Regulatory Guides, NUREG reports, NEI guidelines, INPO standards and EPRI research publications, then places citations in its answers. The Operating Experience Assistant searches past performance logs and event reports, allowing engineers to investigate earlier equipment behavior through a conversational interface.

The deployment follows a six-month pilot at several operating utilities. Constellation Energy, which operates 21 reactors across 12 station sites, took part; Atomic Canyon had also tested its generative tools at Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s Diablo Canyon facility. A third module, focused on diagnostics and troubleshooting, is still being developed, with plant trials planned for later this year.

So what changes in practice? Engineers get a faster route into records that already contain decades of operating knowledge, while citations give them a way to check each answer against the original material. The current rollout is operational, but it is not a finished system: the diagnostic module has not yet reached plant trials, and the announcement provides no speed or accuracy measurements. Atomic Canyon is expanding the software with investment from NVIDIA, Plug and Play Ventures and former Vanguard Group chairman Mortimer Buckley.