Atomic Canyon, a startup founded by Trey Lauderdale eighteen months ago, closed a $7 million seed funding round in May 2025 led by Energy Impact Partners to provide AI-powered document search solutions for the nuclear industry. The company aims to accelerate the traditionally slow nuclear sector whilst tech companies urgently seek reliable power sources for AI data centres. The startup secured its first contract in late 2024 with California's Diablo Canyon Power Plant, which maintains approximately 2 billion pages of documentation.
Atomic Canyon's AI models utilised 20,000 GPU hours of computing power on Oak Ridge National Laboratory's supercomputer after discovering that standard AI models hallucinate when encountering nuclear terminology and acronyms. The company employs a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approach, enabling engineers, maintenance technicians, and compliance officers to quickly locate required documents. According to Lauderdale, document search represents the foundational layer, with long-term plans for AI to create document drafts under human supervision, though the company currently focuses on lower-risk applications.
The funding and Diablo Canyon contract generated inquiries from other nuclear power companies, indicating that AI-powered document management could transform the nuclear industry. Atomic Canyon's models use sentence embedding specifically suited to indexing nuclear documents, which is critical for providing the rapid and reliable power sources demanded by tech companies. The startup has successfully demonstrated that AI can address the nuclear industry's complex documentation challenges, establishing the foundation for a faster and more efficient nuclear sector.
Sources:
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Tim De Chant
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Natalia El Hajj
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