NVIDIA AI servers will help manage nuclear power plants in California

California utility operator Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) intends to build a campus of three data centers with a total capacity of 200 MW in San Jose and implement NVIDIA AI equipment at the site of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, Datacenter Dynamics reports.

As part of a joint project between PG&E Corporation and developer Westbank, three data centers and more than 4 thousand housing units will appear in San Jose. A local energy grid will connect the data centers and surrounding areas, allowing the heat from the data centers to be used for heating and hot water supply to neighboring buildings, achieving zero carbon emissions.

PG&E also announced the deployment of NVIDIA AI hardware and Atomic Canyon AI software solutions at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant. NVIDIA has already stated that the adoption of AI by highly regulated industries such as nuclear energy opens up new opportunities, and Atomic Canyon products will contribute to the growth of the industry’s operational efficiency.

In particular, we are talking about the Neutron Enterprise solution based on the FERMI family of AI models from Atomic Canyon, which were developed jointly with scientists from the US Department of Energy. The solution is intended for nuclear facilities and is mainly used for working with documentation. This is expected to provide significant cost savings and improve the efficiency and safety of nuclear power plants. Atomic Canyon AI products will allow you to receive and process data faster.

Image source: Andrii Ganzevych/unsplash.com

As Reuters notes, the decision to implement AI is not just a fad. The plant was already planned to be closed, but this process was postponed in 2022 due to the need to achieve the planned “carbon-free” targets in the state. Diablo Canyon has 9 thousand different procedures and 9 million documents, many on microfilm. In order for PG&E to maintain its federal operating license for another 20 years, it will need to formulate plans to manage the plant to account for its aging.

Much of the information will have to be obtained from documents prepared decades ago. AI trained on such documents will help find the necessary materials in a huge array, including microfilms, and in the future will be able to help create station maintenance schedules that take into account many factors. At the same time, the entire AI complex operates autonomously and does not have direct access to the global network.

The Diablo Canyon Power Plant was launched in 1985. The combined capacity of the two Westinghouse reactors is about 2.25 GW. It is California’s only remaining operating nuclear power plant and supplies nearly 9% of the state’s electricity, as well as 17% of its zero-carbon energy.