17-07-2025
Westinghouse And Google Pioneer 'Repeatable' Nuclear Plants Design
Nuclear power plant and power lines on the background of sunset
Breaking news from the energy sector suggests that a dark horse company is partnering with a well-known household name to introduce a game plan for scalable nuclear energy in America.
Westinghouse is partnering with Google AI Cloud to design a series of new reactors to power the kinds of digital activities that are made possible by modern neural networks.
Those involved in the energy sector understand that countries like China are pioneering safe and prolific nuclear energy facilities to generate the needed power without burning a lot more coal or fossil fuels.
Here's this from The Diplomat:
'As of July 2024, China's nuclear energy operational capacity puts it just behind second-place France, but its ambitious plans for expansion position the country to potentially surpass both France and the United States (currently the top producer of nuclear energy) by 2030.'
Processes like nanotech temperature protection make traditional nuclear power plants a lot safer, as this Dept. of Energy resource explains in greater detail. There's also advanced fuel design:
'Many advanced reactors plan to use advanced fuel designs that have the potential to further improve the safety and operation of nuclear plants,' department spokespersons write. 'These fuels could endure worst-case conditions longer thanks to materials that are more resistant to radiation, corrosion, and higher temperatures. They're designed to provide longer response times when something goes wrong — like a total loss of power, which is what led to fuel melting in three reactors at Fukushima in 2011 following the earthquake and tsunami.'
The idea is that the Westinghouse/Google plan will make it easier to scale these designs and give us a sizable amount of nuclear energy to balance important climate goals. After all, we've been looking for green energy solutions for decades.
A Corporate Story
Why do I call Westinghouse a 'dark horse' company? Well, aside from a few cognoscenti, most of us know that Westinghouse used to make radios. What's not as widely known is that the firm designed the world's first commercial pressurized water reactor (PWR) in the 1950s.
Eventually, nuclear power became the core of the company's business – and now, it seems, business is booming.
As for stock price changes, the Westinghouse company is not directly publicly traded, notwithstanding its acquisition by Brookfield and Cameco in 2023.
Planning Technology
In order to implement this vision, Westinghouse will be using its proprietary Hive and Bertha AI models.
I decided to save everybody some time and get ChatGPT to define both of these tools.
First, Hive:
'Westinghouse HiVE is a nuclear‑focused generative AI system launched in September 2024. Built on over 75 years of Westinghouse's proprietary data and domain expertise, it's powered by a custom large language model called bertha.
HiVE provides end‑to‑end support across the entire reactor lifecycle—from design, licensing, and construction to operation and maintenance. It excels at tasks like optimizing fuel loading, automating maintenance schedules, improving inspection accuracy, and even generating licensing documentation—dramatically reducing both time and cost.'
So Hive is pretty new, and largely aimed at converging plans that will cover the full life cycle of development in the above ways.
What about Bertha?
'Launched in September 2024, bertha is Westinghouse's proprietary nuclear‑focused large language model, integrated within its HiVE AI system. Named after Bertha Lamme—the first woman in the U.S. to earn a mechanical engineering degree and the first female engineer at Westinghouse—bertha is trained on over 75 years of company data, industrial practices, and domain expertise.
This GenAI model supports critical nuclear applications: automating design‑basis calculations, streamlining licensing documentation, optimizing fuel loading patterns, and enabling anomaly detection during inspections. It's also used in workforce training, knowledge management, and predictive maintenance to enhance safety, reduce operational costs, and accelerate plant lifecycles.'
Dotting the Countryside
Currently, there are almost 100 nuclear plants working across America. The Westinghouse plan involves a few dozen more.
In the U.S., Westinghouse technology powers 56 reactors across the country. That's about 60% of the 94 operating reactors running stateside. However, out of six modern AP1000 reactors in operation now, two are in the U.S. state of Georgia, and the other four are in China.
But the new plans seem to indicate an appetite for keeping the U.S. on the forefront of nuclear energy, which would presumably mean we would transition our residential consumption there, too.
All of this is an interesting resource for learning more about exactly how we're going to power modern data centers without blowing past carbon neutral goals. Certainly, firms like Constellation and TerraPower are going to be involved, too. Stay tuned.
