Westinghouse says that it believes the Hive System - a generative artificial intelligence system built on more than 100 years of its in-house expertise - “will drive improved cost and schedule through the entire reactor lifecycle from design, licensing, manufacturing, construction and operations”.

It features a Nuclear Large Language Model AI System named bertha, after Bertha Lamme who was the first woman in the US to receive a mechanical engineering degree - in 1893 - and then became the first female engineer hired by Westinghouse.

The company says that Hive, which was demonstrated at World Nuclear Symposium in London (see picture above), means its customers can effectively gain access to the company’s huge amount of “proprietary industry innovation and knowledge … via a highly secure system infrastructure and software” which will help, for instance, by “optimising maintenance planning, inspections and improve the digital user experience to provide operational teams with the right information at the right moment”.

Lou Martinez Sancho, Westinghouse Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of R&D, said: “Westinghouse has always been at the forefront of innovation in the nuclear industry and now we are excited to pioneer an integrated nuclear AI system for global deployment … use cases include streamlining preventive plant maintenance and nuclear fuel safety, manufacturing and optimisation applications.”

According to Google’s definition, Generative AI “is powered by foundation models (large AI models) that can multi-task and perform out-of-the-box tasks, including summarisation, Q&A, classification, and more”.