For the first time in over 20 years, the US is set to experience a significant increase in power demand. Trends like AI datacenter buildouts, reshoring of manufacturing capacity, and the electrification of consumer and industrial hardware are converging to bring about an expected ~16% growth over the next five years. This is unprecedented in recent history, drawing comparisons to WWII era rate of change.
In response to this surge in demand, utilities and large energy consumers have been looking for efficient sources of net new power. While many alternatives are being pursued – from reversals of coal plant shutdowns, to solar, wind, and more – nuclear power has made its way back to the forefront as a prime solution for baseload power, in large part due to its energy density properties and cost-effectiveness. Within the past year alone, virtually all large tech players (Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc.) have announced large nuclear power investments.
The US, however, has not built net new nuclear capacity at scale in decades, while existing nuclear power plants have become heavily burdened with complex manual regulatory and operational processes. Building a new nuclear reactor requires lengthy permitting, licensing and inspection procedures; the paperwork alone tends to delay projects for years at a time. Operating an existing nuclear power facility, on the other hand, involves the collective effort of many specialized groups – control room assistants, document services teams, licensed reactor operators, shift technical advisors/managers, unit supervisors, engineers, and technicians – each tasked with drafting and reviewing administrative and technical documentation on a daily basis. From service equipment procedures, to control room checklists, audit files for federal regulators and licensees, and many more. None of these manual, paper-based workflows are supported by specialized software today, taking hundreds of hours of highly skilled engineering time to complete instead. This is placing significant strain on the industry’s efficiency and growth potential.
At Tower Research Ventures, we have been optimistic about the potential of leveraging modern software to relieve the operational and regulatory pressures faced by nuclear power plants for some time. In early 2024, we met Atomic Canyon, and were excited to learn it was focused precisely on this problem – building AI-powered software to improve nuclear power plant operations – and had assembled a team to tackle the challenge. Since leading Atomic Canyon’s pre-seed round last year, we have continued to be impressed with the company’s progress: releasing the leading search engine for NRC documents (Neutron), training the leading nuclear semantic search model in partnership with Oak Ridge National Lab, and announcing a partnership with Nvidia and Diablo Canyon, California’s last operating nuclear power plant. Atomic Canyon plans to broaden its partnerships across the nuclear industry and deepen its workflow automations to more meaningfully streamline operations, stating its ultimate vision is for its products to help shape a future of energy efficiency and abundance..
We are excited to partner with founder and CEO, Trey Lauderdale, and the entire team.
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