Can an AI Black Box Be Trusted to Run a Nuclear Reactor?
- China's Chinese Academy of Sciences unveiled ADANES at WAIC in Shanghai, a five-layer AI system meant to control nuclear reactors from design through decommissioning.
- Nuclear officials call full AI integration inevitable, but today's opaque “black box” large language models clash with the transparency nuclear safety demands.
- The push comes as Microsoft, NVIDIA and a wave of U.S. startups race into nuclear power to feed AI's soaring energy needs, sometimes outpacing safety oversight.
China has unveiled a daring new plan to integrate artificial intelligence throughout the nuclear energy life cycle. This week, at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) revealed a new plan for safely integrating artificial intelligence into the nuclear sector, called ADANES – the Accelerator-Driven Advanced Nuclear Energy System. The system “fundamentally changes the safety logic that governs conventional nuclear reactors” and marks a major turning point in the AI revolution as well as the global nuclear renaissance.
While nuclear disasters are historically rare, their potential fallout is massive. But there is potential for artificial intelligence to lessen this risk. According to Interesting Engineering, “Disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima have reminded us time and again, that the risk of an accident remains with this technology, and we need to prepare for the worst scenarios. A technology like AI is well suited for this role as it can process large number of signals coming in from an operational reactor and shut it down in the earliest stages of a mishap.”
Wang Shoujun, the president of the Chinese Nuclear Society, makes the argument that the integration of large language models into every corner of the economy, including nuclear energy, is an inevitability. By accepting this as fact, the scientists behind the ADANES believe that the responsible thing to do is get ahead of the trend and focus on planning and safety measures, rather than trying to prevent AI from infiltrating the nuclear power sector. Wang says that, through the use of ADANES, “AI will play a core role throughout the full life cycle of nuclear energy by improving quality, efficiency and safety.”
However, today's large language models operate under great opacity, and this ‘black box’ functionality is fundamentally at odds with stringent nuclear energy safety requirements. We need a far greater level of transparency and a deeper understanding of how large language models work and will be applied in this context. According to a recent report from China Daily, ADANES can be used to establish such an understanding.
“The AI architecture consists of five layers — a unified data infrastructure, physics-native world models, physical-system control, intelligent-agent coordination and continuous evolution — embedding AI throughout the system's full life cycle, from design and commissioning to operation and maintenance,” the report states. China is also developing a national-scale supportive infrastructure to provide an “engineering verification platform” for ADANES in order to shore up the long-term stability and viability of the system.
It’s true that the artificial intelligence boom is already finding its way into the nuclear energy sector in various ways and to varying degrees. Earlier this year, tech giants Microsoft and NVIDIA announced that they are jointly rolling out an AI-powered toolkit designed to cut down on arduous permitting, design, and engineering processes that have made new nuclear plants notoriously slow and expensive to build in the United States.
Ushering in a new digital era for nuclear power, the toolkit “provides end-to-end tools that combine AI and digital twins for creating faster iterative design and engineering solutions,” according to a March report from Interesting Engineering. “Licensing and permitting is handled by Generative AI for document drafting and gap analysis.”
Furthermore, the push to develop new and advanced nuclear energy generation capacity is also being largely driven by the AI boom. Silicon Valley is getting increasingly involved in funding and developing next-gen nuclear technologies in order to fuel the rapidly growing energy demands of generative AI, which are projected to far outstrip energy additions unless we make some major breakthroughs. China is not the only nation making unsettlingly daring decisions when it comes to nuclear power. A wave of U.S.-based startups is also eagerly crowding into the sector with concerning disregard for safety measures, creating a concerning security environment in the world's largest economies.
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
Molten Salt Reactors Just Cleared A Major U.S. Regulatory Hurdle
- The DOE granted its first-ever Nuclear Safety Design Agreement for a molten salt reactor, developed by Abilene Christian University in Texas.
- MSRs use molten salt as both fuel and coolant, cutting water use and waste compared with standard reactors, and sidestepping the drought risk that just forced France to shut down reactors.
- Critics say Trump's focus on unproven next-gen tech could slow his goal of quadrupling U.S. nuclear capacity by 2050, while China races ahead with its own thorium reactor.
domestic nuclear energy sector is set to bounce back as the technology finds favor among the public and policymakers alike for its ability to provide round-the-clock clean energy. At a time when data center hyperscalers are driving up energy insecurity and climate deadlines are drawing ever closer, the nuclear option is looking better and better. And not only is the United States trying to kickstart the expansion of traditional nuclear energy, it’s also trying to establish a place at the vanguard of next-gen nuclear energy technologies.
Just this month, in a historic first, the Department of Energy approved a Nuclear Safety Design Agreement for a molten salt reactor currently under development by researchers at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas. Molten salt reactors (MSRs) are emerging as one of the leading potential technologies that could someday take over the global nuclear power sector, as they may be able to solve or sidestep many of the pitfalls associated with traditional nuclear energy.
“MSRs are designed to use less fuel and produce shorter-lived radioactive waste than other reactor types,” describes the United States Department of Energy. “They have the potential to significantly change the safety posture and economics of nuclear energy production by processing fuel online, removing waste products and adding fresh fuel without lengthy refueling outages.” In other words, MSRs are cheaper and safer than a standard nuclear fission reactor.
MSRs are also resource-efficient, with the molten salt acting as both the fuel medium and the coolant for the reactor. This also boosts the security and reliability of these models. Typically, nuclear reactors use water for cooling, which can lead to water stress in dry areas and render traditional power plants vulnerable to drought conditions and heat waves. Just this month, France was forced to take a slew of its nuclear reactors offline as a blistering heat wave heated the nation’s rivers to temperatures too high to be used safely for cooling.
These reactors are still in an experimental phase, but research labs like the one at Abilene Christian University and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee are pushing the technology closer to becoming a commercial reality. ORNL has made critical inroads into modelling and understanding the behavior of molten salt to better design the reactors for practical application, while Abilene is making major steps forward when it comes to regulatory measures. By securing key safety approval earlier this month, the lab has established “baseline parameters required for federal authorization of facility construction and system testing,” according to a recent report from Interesting Engineering.
These developments come against the backdrop of a major push for advanced nuclear power innovation from the Trump administration. The administration has said that it aims to “produce lasting American dominance in the global nuclear energy market” and has earmarked federal funds from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program to accelerate the testing and commercialization of advanced nuclear technologies in order to bring them to scale through Executive Order 14301.
However, critics have pointed out that this focus on next-gen nuclear energy technologies like MSRs could actually be undermining Trump’s broader goal of quadrupling domestic nuclear energy production capacity by 2050. A recent op-ed for the Wall Street Journal argued that “The administration is chasing unproven technology when it could encourage Wall Street investment in large-scale reactors,” and, as a result, Trump’s nuclear renaissance is stalling.
Moreover, where ‘lasting American dominance’ is concerned, Trump’s bullish approach may be too little, too late. Half of the nuclear reactors under construction in the world are in China, and the country is on track to overtake the United States (and France) to become the world’s biggest producer of nuclear energy within the next ten years. And Beijing is at the forefront of next-gen nuclear technologies as well. China claims to have already built an operational thorium-based molten salt reactor (TMSR) that allegedly achieved “first criticality on October 11, 2023” and has since been “steadily generating heat through nuclear fission”.
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
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