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TechCrunch
28-05-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Atomic Canyon wants to be ChatGPT for the nuclear industry
Tech companies are betting heavily that nuclear power can help deliver the electricity they need to realize their AI plans. But data centers need power tomorrow, and the nuclear industry isn't known for its speed. Trey Lauderdale thinks AI can give nuclear the speed that it needs. Lauderdale's obsession with nuclear started close to home. In San Luis Obispo, California, where he lives, he kept running into people who worked at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant. 'They're like the coaches of our flag football team,' he said. In talking with them, he learned that nuclear power plants are swimming in documents. Diablo Canyon, near Lauderdale's home in San Luis Obispo, has around 2 billion pages worth, he said. Lauderdale, a serial healthcare entrepreneur, had a hunch that AI could help the nuclear industry tame its paper problem. Lauderdale founded Atomic Canyon a little over a year and a half ago, initially funding it with his own money. The startup uses AI to help engineers, maintenance technicians, and compliance officers find the documents they need. The startup landed a deal with Diablo Canyon in late 2024. Lauderdale said the deal led to inquiries from other nuclear power companies. 'That's when I knew, as an entrepreneur, we were at a point where we needed to raise a round of capital.' Atomic Canyon closed a $7 million seed round led by the Energy Impact Partners, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. Participating investors include Commonweal Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures, Tower Research Ventures, Wischoff Ventures, and previous angel investors. Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you've built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | REGISTER NOW When Atomic Canyon first started, its AI engineers tested various models with underwhelming results. 'We quickly realized the AI hallucinates when it sees these nuclear words,' Lauderdale said. 'It hasn't seen enough examples of the acronyms.' But building a new AI model requires massive computing power. So Lauderdale talked his way into a meeting with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which conducts nuclear research and also happens to have the world's second fastest supercomputer. The lab was intrigued by the idea and awarded Atomic Canyon 20,000 GPU hours worth of compute. Atomic Canyon's models use sentence embedding, which is particularly suited to indexing documents. It tasks them with making a nuclear power plant's documents searchable using retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG. RAG uses large language models to create responses to queries, but it requires the LLMs to refer to specific documents in an effort to reduce hallucination. For now, Atomic Canyon is sticking to document search, in part because the stakes are lower. 'One of the reasons we're starting generative work around the titles of documents is because getting that wrong might cause someone a little frustration. It doesn't put anyone at risk at the plant,' Lauderdale said. Eventually, Lauderdale envisions Atomic Canyon's AI creating 'a first round draft' of documents, complete with references. 'You are always going to have a human in the loop here,' he said. Lauderdale didn't put a timeline on that effort, though. Search is 'the foundational layer,' he said. 'You have to nail the search.' Plus, given the number of documents in the nuclear industry, 'we have a long runway in search alone,' he said.
TechCrunch
09-05-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Google inks deal to develop 1.8 GW of advanced nuclear power
Google and nuclear site developer Elementl Power announced this week that they will work together on three sites for advanced nuclear reactors. The tech company has been rushing to lock up energy sources as its AI ambitions drive growing power demands at its data centers. This year alone, Google plans to spend $75 billion building data center capacity. With the new deal, Google is promising to add at least 600 megawatts of generating capacity at each of the three sites. Elementl said the reactors will be connected to the grid 'with the option for commercial off-take,' meaning that Google can buy power directly. Elementl has been operating stealthily until this announcement. The team has experience in the nuclear industry, though it hasn't developed any power plants yet. The company was started by Breakwater North and is backed by Energy Impact Partners. Elementl is taking a 'technology agnostic' approach, meaning that it hasn't decided on which small modular reactor (SMR) company it will work with to develop the projects. There are a number of possibilities, though Kairos Power is a likely frontrunner given its existing deal with Google. Kairos says its demo plant will generate 50 megawatts of electricity, with an eventual commercial plant producing 150 megawatts split between two reactors. There's no universally accepted definition, but SMRs tend to top out at 300 megawatts or so. By comparison, the most recently completed nuclear power plant in the U.S., Vogtle Unit 4 in Georgia, generates over 1.1 gigawatts of electricity, nearly four times the size of a large SMR. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you've built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you've built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | BOOK NOW Silicon Valley has been smitten by SMRs. Startups have been rushing into the space, promising to slash reactor costs through mass manufacturing enabled by SMRs' smaller size. That, coupled with the promise of 24/7 power that could be sited close to data centers, has pushed them to sign a number of deals with SMR startups, including Oklo, X-Energy, and the aforementioned Kairos. Yet no SMR has been built outside of China. One startup, NuScale, has gotten close to building one, but it suffered a setback in 2023 when its utility partner canceled its contract after the estimated cost of the project more than doubled — even as the plans were downsized in an effort to contain costs.
