Using AI to Supercharge Nuclear Operations with Atomic Canyon

Nov 19, 2025

Trey Lauderdale, CEO and founder of Atomic Canyon, brings a fresh approach from healthcare tech to the nuclear energy sector. He discusses how deploying generative AI can address workforce shortages and accelerate new reactor deployment. Trey tackles common myths about nuclear safety and highlights the economic benefits of nuclear power. He shares insights on navigating regulatory challenges while illustrating Atomic Canyon's innovative AI applications, including a groundbreaking on-site system designed to streamline operations and enhance document search efficiency.

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INSIGHT

AI Drives Demand For Baseload Nuclear

AI growth will create massive demand for reliable, clean baseload power like nuclear.
Atomic Canyon aims to use AI to both improve nuclear operations and enable nuclear to power the AI supercycle.

INSIGHT

Paperwork Is Nuclear's Hidden Bottleneck

Nuclear's biggest operational bottleneck is extreme administrative and regulatory paperwork.
Trey saw an opportunity to apply AI to reduce that administrative burden and speed licensing and operations.

ANECDOTE

Downloading 53M Pages From NRC

Trey downloaded the NRC's 53 million pages from the ADAMS database to test whether LLMs could handle nuclear language.
Early off-the-shelf models hallucinated, prompting creation of nuclear-specific embeddings.

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Trey Lauderdale is the CEO and Founder of Atomic Canyon, a company bringing artificial intelligence into the nuclear energy sector. Atomic Canyon recently deployed the first commercial on-site generative AI system at a U.S. nuclear facility. While AI’s growth is creating massive demand for reliable, clean baseload power, Atomic Canyon explores the reverse question: does nuclear need AI just as much to solve workforce shortages and accelerate new reactor deployment? Trey’s path to nuclear is unconventional. After building and selling a healthcare communications platform, he moved to San Luis Obispo and discovered he lived 10 miles from California’s last nuclear plant. That proximity led to applying lessons from one highly regulated industry to another. In just two years, Trey has built partnerships with PG&E and Diablo Canyon, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Idaho National Laboratory, the kind of institutional relationships that typically take years to establish in the nuclear industry. Perhaps that speed says something about both the urgency of the problem and the credibility of the solution.

Episode recorded on Aug 12, 2025 (Published on Nov 19, 2025)

In this episode, we cover:

[2:49] An overview of Atomic Canyon
[04:45] Trey’s path from healthcare to nuclear
[08:50] The myths vs reality of nuclear power plants
[10:41] Understanding nuclear’s administrative bottlenecks
[12:14] How Trey started Atomic Canyon with no nuclear experience
[17:59] Learning from Diablo leadership and facility
[20:24] Deploying the first on-premise nuclear AI system
[23:39] Security measures for data sets
[29:23] Building NuclearBench with Idaho National Lab
[32:02] Scaling from one plant to fleet-wide adoption
[38:53] Where Atomic Canyon needs help
[40:09] The company’s funding to date

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*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant