Microsoft (MSFT, Financial) and Idaho National Laboratory have quietly joined forces to tackle one of nuclear power's biggest headaches: the months‑long, millions‑of‑dollars licensing process. They're using Azure's AI tools to draft the dense safety and engineering reports that regulators demand.
Instead of engineers digging through thousands of pages by hand, the AI solution pulls in all the technical documents, weaves together the right language and spits out a first draft of the reports for the NRC and DOE. It's not replacing human experts—it's taking care of the grunt work so people can focus on refining rather than drafting from scratch.
This could be a real game changer. Reactor approvals can stall for a year or more, but if report assembly gets cut down by even a few weeks, developers can move faster on bringing carbon‑free power online to meet rising demand.
And this isn't their first experiment. Back in 2023, Microsoft, INL and Idaho State University built a digital twin of a nuclear reactor using Azure. If this new AI assistant delivers, it might just become the new normal for how the next generation of reactors gets built and licensed.