1/ The U.S. just took a major step toward streamlining nuclear energy—and it’s being powered by AI. Oak Ridge National Lab is partnering with Atomic Canyon to use an AI trained on 53 million pages of nuclear regulatory data to accelerate reactor approvals. Here’s why it matters 🧵

2/ Getting a new nuclear reactor approved in the U.S. is notoriously slow—years, sometimes decades. But the stakes are rising: AI data centers and electrification are driving massive demand for clean, stable power. AI could be the unlock.

3/ ORNL is using its exascale Frontier supercomputer to train an AI called FERMI, powering Atomic Canyon’s Neutron platform. Trained on NRC’s entire ADAMS database (53M+ pages), the model can contextually retrieve licensing precedents, safety rules, and review logic.

4/ The goal: help human reviewers at the NRC rapidly vet new reactor designs—especially advanced small modular reactors (SMRs). Think ChatGPT, but for nuclear licensing. Faster doc review, higher precision, fewer bottlenecks.

5/ This isn’t just R&D. It’s part of a broader federal push (see: ADVANCE Act) to compress reactor approval timelines to 18 months or less. Microsoft, AWS, and Westinghouse are also launching AI partnerships with U.S. labs in this domain.

6/ Neutron AI isn’t doing the final sign-off. But it’s removing the manual bottlenecks—freeing up human experts to focus on risk, not paperwork. They’re even launching Neutron Enterprise, a hardened, secure version for government & defense contractors.

7/ The AI-native approach here mirrors vertical SaaS in regulated industries. Train on messy public data + proprietary docs → Embed into gov/infra workflows → Save months + unlock economic activity It’s regulation-as-code.

8/ Longer-term, AI-native infrastructure for regulatory review could extend far beyond nuclear: 🚜 Energy 🚢 Maritime ✈️ Aviation 🏗️ Construction ⚕️ Healthcare Anywhere with compliance complexity + high friction = greenfield for vertical AI.

9/ Big picture: AI isn’t just transforming software. It’s eating bureaucracy. The regulators who adopt AI earliest will help accelerate the industries that matter most. Nuclear is just the start.