Fission for Algorithms: The Undermining of Nuclear Regulation in Service of AI - AI Now Institute

Dr. Sofia Guerra, FREng and Dr. Heidy Khlaaf Download the PDF → Introduction and Overview As the AI industry’s insatiable energy demands collide with power grid infrastructure limits—with an expected 160 percent increase in data center power demand due to generative AI by 2030 1 Goldman Sachs, “AI Is Poised to Drive 160% Increase in Data Center Power Demand,” May 14, 2024, (<)a href='https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/AI-poised-to-drive-160-increase-in-power-demand'(>)https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/AI-poised-to-drive-160-increase-in-power-demand(<)/a(>). —AI companies have set their sights on nuclear energy as a source from which they can extract a colossal five to fifty gigawatts of additional power by 2028. 2 See Anthropic, “Anthropic’s Recommendations to OSTP for the U.S. AI Action Plan,” March 6, 2025, (<)a href='https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-s-recommendations-ostp-u-s-ai-action-plan'(>)https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-s-recommendations-ostp-u-s-ai-action-plan(<)/a(>); and David Meyer, “OpenAI Reportedly Wants to Build 5-Gigawatt Data Centers, and Nobody Knows Who Could Supply That Much Power,” (<)em(>)Fortune(<)/em(>), September 27, 2024, (<)a href='https://fortune.com/2024/09/27/openai-5gw-data-centers-altman-power-requirements-nuclear'(>)https://fortune.com/2024/09/27/openai-5gw-data-centers-altman-power-requirements-nuclear(<)/a(>). AI labs have thus begun mounting pressure to accelerate the deployment of nuclear energy sources, with major nuclear initiatives underway in an attempt to meet this recent surge in demand. These AI demands are currently infeasible, as nuclear development timelines—often ten to twenty years—are out of step with the pace of AI deployment, with large conventional nuclear reactors only capable of producing up to one gigawatt of power (i.e.,1 GW[e]) per unit. This discrepancy between the AI industry’s energy demands and the lack of technical feasibility to construct nuclear plants at the pace of these stringent (and often contrived) timescales has created a chasm that is ultimately leading to a slew of efforts to fast-track nuclear timelines that raise serious safety and oversight concerns. Although the nuclear sector has the opportunity to expedite global decarbonization efforts, the monopolization of nuclear energy to explicitly power AI raises serious concerns about whether the risks associated with nuclear facilities and unsubstantiated, fast-tracked initiatives can be justified if they are not to the benefit of civil energy consumption, and if they further entrench power asymmetries that may lead to nuclear destabilization and proliferation. This report taxonomizes and assesses these nuclear “fast-tracking” initiatives. We examine their feasibility and their impact on nuclear safety, security, and safeguards 3 The objective of safeguards is to deter the spread of nuclear weapons by the early detection of the misuse of nuclear material or technology. —and more largely society’s potential exposure to radiation levels—across three primary categories: Policy initiatives seeking to lower regulatory practices including long-established nuclear-safety and risk-analysis approaches, safety culture, acceptable risks, and thresholds in order to reduce timescales for the construction of civil and defense nuclear facilities The use of generative AI to expedite regulatory processes such as nuclear licensing and commissioning for both civil and defense nuclear facilities The promotion of advanced and new nuclear technologies that are contingent on novel or unmaterialized approaches and infeasible timescales Arkansas Nuclear One (Photo from Nuclear Regulatory Commission/Flickr) First, policy initiatives are being introduced to lower regulatory oversight in order to expedite the construction of civil nuclear facilities. AI labs’ assertions regarding the urgency of immediate energy needed for AI has put unprecedented pressure on regulators to reconsider well-established nuclear-safety and risk-analysis approaches, such as the linear no-threshold (LNT) model for radiation exposure and the “as low as reasonably achievable” (ALARA) risk principle with a lack of well-researched and tried-and-tested alternatives to replace these standards. 4 White House, “Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” May 23, 2025, (<)a href='https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/ordering-the-reform-of-the-nuclear-regulatory-commission'(>)https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/ordering-the-reform-of-the-nuclear-regulatory-commission(<)/a(>). 5 In the UK, a regulator review is underway, but the conclusions and recommendations have not been finalized yet. See Department for Energy Security & Net Zero and Ministry of Defence, (<)em(>)Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce: Interim Report(<)/em(>), August 11, 2025, (<)a href='https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-regulatory-taskforce/nuclear-regulatory-taskforce-interim-report'(>)https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-regulatory-taskforce/nuclear-regulatory-taskforce-interim-report(<)/a(>). These initiatives are simultaneously accompanied by the reduced independence of nuclear regulatory bodies, 6 White House, “Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” May 23, 2025, (<)a href='https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/ordering-the-reform-of-the-nuclear-regulatory-commission'(>)https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/ordering-the-reform-of-the-nuclear-regulatory-commission(<)/a(>). justified by alleged national-security imperatives tied to a purported AI arms race. However, such a politicization of nuclear regulation will ultimately lead to the skewing of cost-benefit analysis that may result in increased risk tolerances to society’s potential exposure to radiation levels. That is, the use of nuclear energy to power the development of generative AI further increases the risk of the public’s exposure to ionizing radiation without a clear or substantiated benefit to justify it. Furthermore, the unprecedented trend of AI labs directly investing in the very nuclear providers they intend to utilize to exclusively power their data centers may lead to conflicts of interest that compromise nuclear licensee readiness and expectations in terms of organizational capabilities and safety culture. Second, AI-based proposals (and even deployment) have been put forward by AI labs, 7 Nelli Babayan, “Microsoft AI for Nuclear Licensing,” Microsoft, September 17, 2024, (<)a href='https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2426/ML24263A264.pdf'(>)https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2426/ML24263A264.pdf(<)/a(>). nuclear providers, 8 Westinghouse, “Redefining the Future of Nuclear Power with AI,” accessed October 26, 2025, (<)a href='https://westinghousenuclear.com/innovation/westinghouse-ai'(>)https://westinghousenuclear.com/innovation/westinghouse-ai(<)/a(>). and licensees 9 Nuclear News, “INL to Use Microsoft’s AI to Streamline Nuclear Licensing,” NuclearNewswire, July 18, 2025, (<)a href='https://www.ans.org/news/2025-07-18/article-7204/inl-to-use-microsofts-ai-to-streamline-nuclear-licensing'(>)https://www.ans.org/news/2025-07-18/article-7204/inl-to-use-microsofts-ai-to-streamline-nuclear-licensing(<)/a(>). to use large language models (LLMs) to generate nuclear regulatory and licensing documents in hopes of expediting nuclear licensing and commissioning processes. Such efforts purportedly claim that generative-AI will “analys[e] historic nuclear licensing data [that] allows licensing engineers to draft new permitting documents more quickly, ready for review and refinement.” 10 Lloyd Register, “Lloyd’s Register to Use Generative AI to Advance the Application of Nuclear Technology in Maritime in Collaboration with Microsoft,” March 6, 2025, (<)a href='https://www.lr.org/en/knowledge/press-room/press-listing/press-release/2025/lloyds-register-to-use-generative-ai-to-advance-the-application-of-nuclear-technology-inmaritime-in-collaboration-with-microsoft'(>)https://www.lr.org/en/knowledge/press-room/press-listing/press-release/2025/lloyds-register-to-use-generative-ai-to-advance-the-application-of-nuclear-technology-inmaritime-in-collaboration-with-microsoft(<)/a(>). Yet claims that this use of AI “enables a faster and more cost-effective pathway” are not only unsubstantiated, but are impossible to actualize to meet the objective of the licensing process: to reason and understand the safety of the plant, to explore trade-offs between approaches and architecture, and to communicate why the plant is safe. Using AI will not support achieving these objectives—but it may lead to the compromise of nuclear safety and security, given that the most minute mistake introduced within the nuclear licensing process can have catastrophic and cascading consequences, compromising nuclear safety and potentially exposing society to radiation levels. The lack of security observed in commercial LLMs and their vulnerable supply chain may also lead to the compromise of the operation of existing nuclear plants, and undermine the safeguarding of measures intended to avert nuclear proliferation. Giving AI models access to sensitive nuclear data, as necessitated by these proposals, poses a novel risk of nuclear weapons proliferation and jeopardizes the ability of states to honor their international legal obligations to use nuclear material and technology only for peaceful purposes. More generally, the absence or unclear control of access to nuclear-technology information may allow nation-states or agents lacking the know-how to build nuclear weapons to be able to do so. Third, advanced nuclear technologies such as Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), Advanced Modular Reactors (AMRs), and even nuclear fusion are being touted as alternatives that would immediately alleviate the nuclear timescale bottlenecks presented by conventional nuclear reactors. However, SMRs are a relatively novel technology, with only sixty-two SMRs being in the design prototyping phase, while only five are in actual operation following decades of development and construction. 11 International Atomic Energy Agency, (<)em(>)Small Modular Reactors Technology Catalogue: 2024 Edition,(<)/em(>) June 2025, (<)a href='https://aris.iaea.org/Publications/SMR_catalogue_2024.pdf'(>)https://aris.iaea.org/Publications/SMR_catalogue_2024.pdf(<)/a(>); Nuclear Energy Agency,(<)em(>) (<)/em(>)The NEA Small Modular Reactor Dashboard, April 2023, (<)a href='https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_78743/the-nea-small-modular-reactor-dashboard'(>)https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_78743/the-nea-small-modular-reactor-dashboard(<)/a(>). Estimates of viability for SMRs as a deployable technology may take several years, with a lack of certainty that they will achieve the same economies of scale that conventional nuclear plants provide. 12 Nuclear Energy Agency, “The Challenges and Opportunities in Financing Small Modular Nuclear Reactors,” OECD, May 21, 2021, (<)a href='https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_59235/the-challenges-and-opportunities-in-financing-small-modular-nuclear-reactors'(>)https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_59235/the-challenges-and-opportunities-in-financing-small-modular-nuclear-reactor(<)/a(>). There have also been no significant scientific advancements that would prove the feasibility of nuclear fusion, let alone the design and deployment of a functioning plant within the coming years. Ultimately, claims that advanced nuclear technologies can be implemented by 2028 13 Stephen Nellis, “Helion Energy Starts Construction on Nuclear Fusion Plant to Power Microsoft Data Centers,” Reuters, July, 30, 2025, (<)a href='https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/helion-energy-starts-construction-nuclear-fusion-plant-power-microsoft-data-2025-07-30'(>)https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/helion-energy-starts-construction-nuclear-fusion-plant-power-microsoft-data-2025-07-30(<)/a(>). are optimistic, implying a dramatic (and potentially dangerous) acceleration of licensing, regulatory, commissioning, and plant-construction timelines. These claims may put undue pressure on regulators 14 Nuclear News, “DOE Fast Tracks Test Reactor Projects: What to Know,” NuclearNewswire, August 12, 2025, (<)a href='https://www.ans.org/news/article-7273/ten-companies-named-for-fasttracked-reactor-pilots-what-to-know'(>)https://www.ans.org/news/article-7273/ten-companies-named-for-fasttracked-reactor-pilots-what-to-know(<)/a(>). to license novel commercial reactor designs in manufactured or infeasible timescales, which calls into question the safety of said designs. This work thus examines these three initiatives and their feasibility, impact, and the risks they pose on two levels: increases in civilian exposure to ionizing radiation, and nuclear destabilization and proliferation for nation-states. We first provide a brief and non-exhaustive historical overview of relevant civilian nuclear regulations, followed by an analysis of how a purported AI arms race is being weaponized to dangerously discard, without evidence, the very risk and safety thresholds—that is, LNT and ALARA—established amid the nuclear arms race during the Cold War. Then, we survey the larger process of producing and reviewing nuclear licensing documentation to commission and operate nuclear plants, and the efficacy and risks in utilizing LLMs for said processes and safety argumentation (e.g.,safety cases) that may lead to unsafe plants. This includes the exploration of how LLMs can be compromised through a wide array of vulnerabilities that bring not only the safety of their use into question, but their cybersecurity readiness (or lack thereof), which may also compromise national security and nuclear safeguarding. Finally, we explore how, alongside advocacy for subverting well-established nuclear safety norms, tech firms have promoted experimental advanced nuclear technologies that have been predicated on unsubstantiated claims requiring either technological breakthroughs that have yet to come to fruition, or an unsafe acceleration of nuclear timelines. We conclude that these “fast-tracking” initiatives create dual risks for the public: the use of LLMs in nuclear infrastructure likely leading to the public’s increased risk of exposure to ionizing radiation and nuclear proliferation; and the accelerated efforts to utilize nuclear energy to power the development of these LLMs, further elevating these risks. If these initiatives continue to be pursued, their lack of safety may lead not only to catastrophic nuclear consequences, but also to an irreversible distrust within public perception of nuclear technologies that may inhibit the support of the nuclear sector as part of our global decarbonization efforts in the future. The first five Atomic Energy Commissioners at Los Alamos in 1947 (Photo from U.S. Department of Energy/Flickr) Key Developments in Civilian Nuclear Regulation At the height of the Cold War