US DOE invests $60M in AI nuclear program as China unveils AI reactor system

The U.S. Department of Energy is funding Project Prometheus with a $60 million grant to use artificial intelligence across the nuclear power lifecycle, from reactor design and licensing to manufacturing and operations. Led by Idaho National Laboratory, the three‑year effort brings together four national labs, several universities, tech giants such as NVIDIA, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, and more than 20 nuclear‑industry partners. Prometheus aims to cut reactor deployment times and operating costs by about half by creating a secure digital thread that links engineering models, regulatory data, and operational records.

Separately, China’s Chinese Academy of Sciences presented the ADANES system at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. The five‑layer AI platform is intended to oversee nuclear reactors from design through decommissioning, promising improvements in safety, efficiency and quality. Chinese nuclear officials argue that integrating large‑language‑model based AI is inevitable, while critics point to the opacity of such “black‑box” systems as a potential safety risk.