US nuclear company TerraPower and digital engineering and technology consulting company SoftServe have released a preview of the NVIDIA Omniverse-powered engineering platform they are designing to accelerate the siting and design of Terrapower’s Natrium reactor from years to months.
The platform, built with the NVIDIA Omniverse operating system, uses digital twin technology to address key design bottlenecks such as early-stage site engineering and design packages. The digital twin compresses what once took engineering teams years to complete into weeks by analysing thousands of variables simultaneously. The platform goes beyond digitising design files by embedding different plant designs and layouts into geotechnical modelling, grid interconnection analysis and site-specific layout optimisation. This enables projects to move through critical milestones faster. The demonstration highlights the seamless AI-powered functionality of reducing site-specific design work from 18 months to as little as eight weeks.
“To meet growing power demand, advanced nuclear plants must move to construction faster, with higher design precision and disciplined execution,” said Eric Williams, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at TerraPower. “With our initial Natrium plant design complete, we are able to leverage our partnerships with NVIDIA and SoftServe to deploy an AI-powered digital twin to enhance our engineering teams efforts and greatly improve our speed to market capabilities.”
“Using simulation and AI powered by NVIDIA, TerraPower and SoftServe are transforming how the world designs, licenses, permits, builds and operates advanced nuclear power plants,” said Marc Spieler, Senior Managing Director, Energy at NVIDIA. “This shows how digital twin technology can dramatically compress timelines and help deliver clean, reliable energy faster than ever before.”
Dennis Loktinov, Senior Director of Enterprise Solutions at SoftServe, noted: “Nuclear site engineering has always been expensive to get wrong and until now, teams couldn’t really see the constraints until they were already committed to a layout. What we built with TerraPower on NVIDIA Omniverse changes that. Exclusion zones, terrain conflicts, cost tradeoffs – all of it is now visible in 3D, in real time, before a single dollar goes to construction. The bottleneck was never due to capability—it was the time it took to trust the design. We’ve removed that.”
