Week 46 of 2024

Three nuclear energy innovation news!

🤖 Atomic Canyon's Neutron Enterprise generative AI solution, built and running on NVIDIA's full-stack AI platform, is being deployed at Pacific Gas and Electric Company's Diablo Canyon to transform document search and retrieval. The Diablo Canyon Power Plant is California's only remaining nuclear power facility, delivering ~9% of the state's electricity. Connected to the grid in the mid-1980's, it was poised to be shut down in 2025, before being extended until at least 2030. It will now be home to the first commercial deployment of on-site generative AI solutions for the nuclear energy sector--a herald of new times to come.

☀ OpenStar Technologies, a small New-Zealand startup, claims it has created a ~300.000K plasma for 20s. This milestone was achieved in under two years and for less than $10m. They describe their unconventional reactor design as an "inside out" tokamak: a high-temperature superconducting magnet is levitated inside the superheated plasma, avoid wall interactions and reducing complex thermal management issues.

💸 The EIC Accelerator Open call now explicitely accepts proposals with nuclear applications. The program, handled by the European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency (EISMEA), is the EU's flagship tool to fund innovative startups. The EIC Work Programme 2025 has a total budget of €1.4b to support deeptech initiatives, an increase of nearly €200m compared to 2024.

👨‍🎓 Paper of the week: "Performance evaluation of a nuclear facility monitoring system using multi-sensor network and artificial intelligence algorithm", Nuclear Engineering and Technology (2024)

👉 Sensor network + AI location tracking = accuracy of over 99%.