Trey Lauderdale, the founder of Atomic Canyon, has a powerful goal—to change the way the nuclear industry works using artificial intelligence. The new company, founded in San Luis Obispo, California, a little more than a year and a half ago. Just last month, it raised a $7 million seed round from Energy Impact Partners. Lauderdale’s initiative comes at a crucial time. He does think AI has the potential to provide the nuclear sector with the agility it needs to create solutions for its pressing problems.
Lauderdale’s interest in nuclear energy was piqued locally by the now-closed and decommissioned Diablo Canyon Power Plant. This facility is one of the largest single-site energy producers in that state. It contains nearly 2 billion pages of federal government documents, a truly immense treasure trove of material. When Lauderdale noticed an opportunity for innovation, he didn’t hesitate to dive in. He began conversations with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which subsequently awarded Atomic Canyon 20,000 GPU hours of computational power. This backing from one of the nation’s top research institutions highlights how serious and credible Lauderdale’s venture is.
Even before the pandemic, Lauderdale bankrolled Atomic Canyon entirely with his personal savings from the start. His own significant investment further demonstrates his deep commitment to the project. He’s excited to do it all in an industry that he argues is due for disruption. He dreams of Atomic Canyon’s AI creating a “first round draft” of key documents. This new capacity would be accompanied by guardrails and greatly simplify processes that are often complicated and confusing.
The journey has not been without its challenges. At first, Atomic Canyon’s AI techs were just experimenting with different models and achieved lackluster results. Lauderdale noted, “We quickly realized the AI hallucinates when it sees these nuclear words,” emphasizing the complexities of working with industry-specific terminology. He added, “It hasn’t seen enough examples of the acronyms,” highlighting a significant hurdle in training the AI effectively.
At the moment, Atomic Canyon is focusing on search functionality for legal docs first because those are the ones with slightly lower stakes. Lauderdale stated, “One of the reasons we’re starting generative work around the titles of documents is because getting that wrong might cause someone a little frustration. It doesn’t put anyone at risk at the plant.” This incrementalist approach is an effective way to improve things bit by bit while testing their safety first.
As Atomic Canyon continues to prototype its technology, Lauderdale is still adamant that human oversight has to figure into the equation. “You are always going to have a human in the loop here,” he asserted. As a result, he views his team as integral to the project’s success. He even refers to them as “the teachers that coach our youth football team.”
Atomic Canyon leverages cutting-edge AI methods, including sentence embedding to automatically create indices for the document collections. This strategy is intended to streamline public information access within the nuclear industry. Lauderdale’s venture flourishes with deep backing from such notables as the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Armed with a succinct vision to drive novel solutions, the enterprise is poised to leapfrog far ahead in improving operational effectiveness in nuclear power.
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