AI tools credited with cutting nuclear licensing reviews from four years to nine months

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has reduced the time required for some nuclear facility licensing reviews from four years to nine months, NRC Chief Data Officer and Deputy Chief AI Officer Basia Sall said at the ATARC Mission AI Summit on June 25. Sall attributed the acceleration to a combination of regulatory reforms and the adoption of AI tools.

Sall noted that an executive order issued by President Donald Trump in May 2025 set an 18-month target for licensing reviews, but AI helped the agency surpass that goal. “We just finished that first round of that licensing in nine months,” she said. Internal teams have since indicated they can further optimize the process using AI.

Beyond speeding up reviews, the NRC is using AI to assist with drafting regulatory documents by referencing precedent from past decisions. The agency has also partnered with industry developers, allowing them to curate NRC public data for their own AI applications. “What that means is we receive a much better application than we have in the past,” Sall said. “We don't have as many questions. It's clear once we get it into our hands, we start our process, we accept it and then we start to do our review process.”

The NRC is leveraging AI tools available through the General Services Administration’s OneGov initiative, which launched in April 2025 to provide agencies discounted access to private-sector technologies. Sall said the NRC has tested models such as Anthropic’s Claude, Azure OpenAI, and Google Gemini for limited use cases involving public data, reporting “good success” with these tools.

The agency is also adopting GSA’s USAi platform, launched in August 2025, which serves as a testing environment for AI tools across federal agencies. A GSA official said over 25 agencies were already using USAi, with 16 more expected to join by the end of 2026. Sall described USAi as a “menu” of tools the NRC plans to evaluate for regulatory applications.

In addition to adopting third-party tools, the NRC has developed its own AI system called SimplifAI, built on Azure OpenAI. The tool, now in version 2.0 after its initial release was deprecated, supports regulatory document generation and other tasks such as speechwriting for employees. “We're really proud that tool continues to develop,” Sall said.