Accelerating Safe Microreactor Deployment with AI-Powered Knowledge

By: Pingbo Tang

Deploying nuclear microreactors to increase energy infrastructure resilience — especially as electricity demand from AI is surging — demands more than safe engineering. It requires the ability to reuse proven designs, procedures, and training systems across national borders and regulatory regimes.

At Carnegie Mellon University, researchers are developing AI-powered frameworks that help designers, engineers, training developers, and regulators communicate clearly and collaborate efficiently across domains.

Why it matters: Today’s microreactor innovations are often stalled not by technical limitations, but by semantic mismatches in regulation, communication silos among stakeholders, and duplicative licensing efforts across jurisdictions.

For example, a single term — like “Important to Safety” — can have dramatically different interpretations in U.S. versus Canadian regulatory systems.
Without intelligent tools to bridge these gaps, organizations struggle to align designs, training programs, and safety justifications, wasting valuable time and resources.

The opportunity: By modeling the knowledge ecosystem surrounding microreactors, we can validate designs and engineered solutions to be reused and adapted more quickly across missions, facilities, and national boundaries.

Training procedures approved in one context can be reviewed for compatibility in another.
Regulatory reviewers can trace design decisions back to their justifications and precedents, while engineers can proactively identify and resolve potential compliance gaps.

What we’re doing: Carnegie Mellon researchers are seizing this opportunity with a combination of large language models (LLMs), semantic mapping, and graph-based reasoning. Their approach includes:

Cross-regulatory semantic comparison: AI models extract, align, and disambiguate terminology from regulatory documents issued by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) to enable meaningful, clause-level comparison and reuse of design justifications.
Multistakeholder knowledge graphs: The team builds domain-specific graphs that integrate technical requirements, operational data, training procedures, and regulatory rules — supporting transparent collaboration across engineering, operations, training, and oversight.
Simulator-integrated human-system interfaces (HSIs): These interfaces connect real-time operator behavior with contextual regulatory and procedural expectations, enabling adaptive training and safety assurance even in remote or autonomous deployments.

The research team is developing and validating these capabilities through:

Graph-driven design and review workflows, where engineers, training developers, and regulators can query system components, failure modes, and precedent cases with shared context.
Behavior-procedure alignment tools, comparing simulator logs with prescribed procedures to detect divergence, improve training, and refine interfaces for clarity and consistency.
AI-assisted documentation tools, helping teams translate between design rationales, training objectives, and regulatory language in a consistent, machine-interpretable format.

What’s next: Prototypes are in development, with simulation data and expert input guiding iterative design. These tools will inform future reports, stakeholder briefings, and decision-making frameworks for nuclear oversight and workforce training.

Go deeper: Project updates and documentation will be published at Human-Machine Harmony for Infrastructure. Relevant foundational research includes: