Atomic Canyon Partners with Idaho National Laboratory to Develop First Nuclear Industry AI Benchmarks

Collaboration Creates Standards for Safe AI Adoption in Nuclear Operations

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif., and IDAHO FALLS, Idaho, Sept. 09, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Atomic Canyon, the developer of AI-powered search and generative AI tools for the nuclear power industry, today announced a strategic partnership with Idaho National Laboratory (INL) to develop and publicly release the first comprehensive benchmark suite for evaluating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and large language models (LLMs) in nuclear applications.

The partnership will establish critical standards for AI adoption in nuclear facility operations, addressing an industry need for objective evaluation methods for generative AI systems in nuclear environments.

Setting the Standard for Nuclear AI

Nuclear facilities and national laboratories store decades of operating logs, maintenance records, and engineering drawings—much of it trapped in scanned PDFs or proprietary repositories. The new benchmark suite will enable nuclear operators to evaluate AI systems that can access public nuclear documentation through retrieval-augmented generation techniques.

"This partnership represents a pivotal moment for the nuclear industry's digital transformation," said Trey Lauderdale, CEO of Atomic Canyon. "Nuclear facilities require the highest standards of safety and compliance, and our collaboration with INL will establish the gold standard for evaluating AI systems in nuclear environments. These benchmarks will give utilities, regulators, and technology vendors a common framework for ensuring AI systems meet the rigorous demands of nuclear operations while maintaining the absolute highest levels of safety and security."

Leveraging National Laboratory Expertise

INL will contribute its unique nuclear subject-matter expertise and access to curated public datasets. The benchmark tasks will focus on real-world nuclear workflows, including document retrieval, regulatory compliance checks, and answering technical questions.

Christopher Ritter, Division Director of Scientific Computing & AI and director of the Digital Innovation Center of Excellence (DICE) at Idaho National Laboratory, said: "This partnership with Atomic Canyon will establish the benchmarks needed to effectively deploy AI across the nuclear enterprise. By creating standardized evaluation methods, we're enabling the industry to confidently adopt AI technologies that can accelerate nuclear energy deployment for America."

Addressing Critical Industry Needs

The benchmark suite addresses a fundamental challenge in nuclear AI deployment: evaluating systems that must work with both public nuclear documentation and facility-specific technical data. Existing AI evaluation benchmarks are insufficient for the nuclear sector’s unique requirements for safety, regulatory compliance, and security.

Over six months, the project will curate datasets, define benchmark tasks and evaluation metrics, and produce comprehensive documentation, including a technical summary, for community distribution via open-source repositories.

All data, definitions, and criteria will be released under open-source public licenses, ensuring the nuclear and AI communities can benefit from this foundational work. Atomic Canyon will develop and release the accompanying evaluation software and tools under permissive open-source licenses.

About Atomic Canyon

Atomic Canyon develops AI-powered search and generative AI tools specifically for the nuclear power industry. The company's flagship product, Neutron Enterprise, provides AI-powered capabilities across vast repositories of technical documentation at nuclear facilities. By securely connecting to internal data sources and external authoritative technical and regulatory data sources, Neutron Enterprise enables nuclear professionals to access critical information in seconds rather than hours. Atomic Canyon recently raised $7 million in seed funding led by Energy Impact Partners to accelerate deployments across the nuclear industry. For more information, visit www.atomic-canyon.com.

About Idaho National Laboratory

Battelle Energy Alliance manages INL for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy. INL is the nation’s center for nuclear energy research and development, and also performs research in each of DOE’s strategic goal areas: energy, national security, science and the environment. For more information, visit www.inl.gov.

Media Contacts:

Atomic Canyon
atomiccanyon@launchsquad.com

Idaho National Laboratory
Sarah.Neumann@inl.gov

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