Application of the Oak Ridge Super Computer to Streamline Document Access at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant.

[NNadir]

Under the theory that if anyone, anywhere, at any time, is injured by exposure to radiation ever, it's worse than the destruction of the planetary atmosphere, the nuclear industry is required to maintain ponderous documentation to prevent anything less than absolute perfection.

Perfection is expensive and labor intensive.

The Supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab - one of the most powerful computers in the world - has worked with a nuclear start up, to manage document access at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant, the last nuclear plant in California.

Frontier supercomputer ushers in new era of nuclear AI

Subtitle:

Tech startup Atomic Canyon used the Frontier supercomputer to train nuclear-specific AI models to speed up document search and analysis capabilities for nuclear reactors

From the text:

Nuclear power is rising to meet the demand for American energy. But building new reactors or even renewing licenses of existing ones requires a tremendous amount of paperwork. Fortunately, AI is also on the rise, and paperwork is one of the things it does best.

In an innovative new AI project, tech startup company Atomic Canyon and their partner, Diablo Canyon — California’s only operational nuclear power plant — used the Frontier supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to develop novel AI models based on the unique needs of the nuclear industry.

The AI models are designed to reduce the time, labor and resources the nuclear industry spends searching the millions upon millions of complex nuclear documents related to parts, maintenance records, engineering evaluations, regulations and plant procedures. The AI models are open-source and available to anyone in the nuclear industry. Once fully developed, the AI models could be used in plants all across the country.

“We need energy — period — and nuclear is an absolutely key component to enabling the energy we have today and building energy for the future,” said Trey Lauderdale, the founder and CEO of Atomic Canyon...

...Nuclear power is rising to meet the demand for American energy. But building new reactors or even renewing licenses of existing ones requires a tremendous amount of paperwork. Fortunately, AI is also on the rise, and paperwork is one of the things it does best.

In an innovative new AI project, tech startup company Atomic Canyon and their partner, Diablo Canyon — California’s only operational nuclear power plant — used the Frontier supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to develop novel AI models based on the unique needs of the nuclear industry.

The AI models are designed to reduce the time, labor and resources the nuclear industry spends searching the millions upon millions of complex nuclear documents related to parts, maintenance records, engineering evaluations, regulations and plant procedures. The AI models are open-source and available to anyone in the nuclear industry. Once fully developed, the AI models could be used in plants all across the country.

“We need energy — period — and nuclear is an absolutely key component to enabling the energy we have today and building energy for the future,” said Trey Lauderdale, the founder and CEO of Atomic Canyon...

... Zawalick said she estimates staff probably spend around 15,000 hours a year just searching for documents. Diablo Canyon’s databases contain about 2 billion pages of documents, which require a significant amount of institutional knowledge to navigate. She pointed to a recent example in which an issue with a single valve triggered a 6-month investigation that pulled staff away from their regular duties.

“A hundred and eighty-one working days if anyone was counting,” said Erin Bowe, Diablo Canyon nuclear innovation supervisor...

The full article is available at the link.

People are in general, suspicious of AI, but there are things it does well and this strikes me as an application that is meaningful.

The computational resources at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are capable of assisting not only in managing bureaucratic requirements of course, but also in addressing extremely demanding scientific calculations.

As for Diablo Canyon, my view is that it needs to stay on line far beyond 2030, if necessary, via refurbishment. It is an essential resource.

[erronis]

1. This seems to be a good use of the pattern-matching capabilities of "AI"

After all, when a researcher approaches a huge corpus of documents (and this appears to be huger than most), they are looking for terms, phrases, usages, contextual hints, etc. An "AI" model trained on the terminology of nuclear energy, physics, environmental subjects, etc. would be far more efficient than a human, especially with eyes tired after 4-6 hours.

This seems similar to how this technology is being used in decoding the petabytes of data coming in from our telescopes and also similar to what has advanced our understanding of genetics and proteins in the last decade or more.

[NNadir]

2. I have understood that Roger Penrose offered a coda to "The Emperor's New Mind," in light of the artificial...

..."intelligence" term.

I will never get around to reading it; for me Penrose is a hard slog anyway.

I did recently attend a lecture by David Krakauer recently, this one:

The Natural History of Reality: An Introduction to Complexity Science

He claimed that the word "intelligence" in "artificial intelligence" is, well, artificial.

I'm sure though that it is possible to produce an algorithm that can be trained to address paths through bureaucracy.

As a political liberal, I believe in regulation, but it does seem to me that the nuclear industry is over regulated, particularly because it is clearly producing the cleanest and safest possible energy there is. It seems unwieldy and unwise that we require the expenditure of 15,000 human hours per year to keep a clean machine running. It would be better to regulate systems that actually kill people, like fossil fuel facilities for instance.

[erronis]

3. Thanks to your reference to David Krakauer. I was hoping to find a recording of that presentation,

but I'll settle for reading one of his books. Looking on the inter-library loan systems now.

As you and I both know, the vested interests of the oil industry (oleumarchy?) is trying to stifle alternate energy sources.

[NNadir]

4. To me, there is only one "alternative" energy source that matters, a point I often make.

To be clear, I don't regard so called "renewable energy" as an "alternative energy source." Enthusiasm for this trillion dollar "renewable energy" scam has left the fossil fuel industry fat and happy, while destroying vast swathes of once pristine wilderness.

I don't consider nuclear energy to be "alternative energy," because in so many cases this includes - regrettably with emphasis on them and often with expressed contempt for nuclear - solar and wind.

The nuclear industry is established, viable, and, with some limited time constraints involving the doubling time of breeding for free access to fissionable nuclei, infinitely expandable at moderate cost in our times, of remarkable value in times to come, to the coming generations we have so callously screwed.

To me, there is only nuclear energy, and "everything else," everything else, including so called "renewable energy" dependent on access to fossil fuels, not to mention rapacious use of land and materials, and therefore environmentally unacceptable.

The oil, gas and coal industries are very clever advertisers. We had lots of ads here recently, barely disguised as environmental posts, to rebrand fossil fuels as "green hydrogen." They seem, happily, to have stopped.

As for the oil industry's attitude toward so called "renewable energy," I recall, if everyone else has forgotten, that just before the Deepwater Horizon blowout - which killed more people than Fukushima - the owner of that rig, BP, was calling itself, in a vast line of bullshit, "Beyond Petroleum." That of course, was a transparent lie, "renewable" lipstick on the fossil pig.

As for Krakauer, I had no idea who he was until attending the lecture at the suggestion of a friend. I was familiar with another Santa Fe Institute scientist, Stuart Kauffman, owing to having run across his work, The Origins of Order.

In one of the best afternoons of my life, I got to discuss Kauffman with Freeman Dyson, whereupon he agreed that the best definition of living systems was Kaufmann's description of them as "Eddies in Thermodynamics." (I was surprised - and shouldn't have been in retrospect - that when I mentioned Kauffman to Dyson, he knew his work in detail and his personal life as well.)

The Santa Fe Institute strikes me as a very interesting place, comparable, I'm sure to our Institute of Advanced Study here in New Jersey, Findhorne's for scientists. It would be very cool to be a fly on the wall there, just as it is to be such a fly at the Institute of Advanced Study.