this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2025
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218
For the First Time, Artificial Intelligence Is Being Used at a Nuclear Power Plant (gizmodo.com)
submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
50 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

For now, the artificial intelligence tool named Neutron Enterprise is just meant to help workers at the plant navigate extensive technical reports and regulations — millions of pages of intricate documents from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that go back decades — while they operate and maintain the facility. But Neutron Enterprise’s very existence opens the door to further use of AI at Diablo Canyon or other facilities — a possibility that has some lawmakers and AI experts calling for more guardrails.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 days ago (2 children)

What could go wrong?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

using AI in a nuclear plant at Diablo Canyon... it's so on the nose you'd say it's lazy writing if it were part of the backstory of some scifi novel.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Well, considering it's exclusively for paperwork and compliance, the worst that can happen is someone might rely on it too much and file incorrect, I dunno, license renewal with the DOE and be asked to do it again.

Ah. The horror.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 days ago (1 children)

When it comes to compliance and regulations, anything with the literal blast radius of a nuclear reactor should not be trusted to LLM unless double or triple checked by another party familiar with said regulations. Regulations were written in blood, and an LLM hallucinating a safety procedure or operating protocol is a disaster waiting to happen.

I have less qualms about using it for menial paperwork, but if the LLM adds an extra round-trip to a form, it's not just wasting the submitter's time, but other people's as well.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

All the errors you know about in the nuclear power industry are human-caused.

Is this an industry with a 100% successful operation rate? Not at all.

But have you ever heard of a piece of paperwork with an error submitted to regulatory officials and lawyers outside the plant causing a critical issue inside the plant? I sure haven't. Please feel free to let me know if you are aware of such an incident.

I would encourage you to learn more about how LLM and SLM structures work. This article is more of a nothingburger superlative clickbait IMO. To me, at least it appears to be airgapped if it's running locally, which is nice.

I would bet money that this will be entirely managed by the most junior compliance person who is not 120 years old, with more senior folks cross checking it with more suspicion than they would a new hire.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago

I'm not sure if that opening sentence is fatuous or not. What errors in any industrial enterprise are not human in origin?