this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2025
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For now, the artificial intelligence tool named Neutron Enterprise is just meant to help workers at the plant navigate extensive technical reports and regulations — millions of pages of intricate documents from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that go back decades — while they operate and maintain the facility. But Neutron Enterprise’s very existence opens the door to further use of AI at Diablo Canyon or other facilities — a possibility that has some lawmakers and AI experts calling for more guardrails.

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[–] [email protected] 90 points 2 days ago (4 children)

It's just a custom LLM for records management and regulatory compliance. Literally just for paperwork, one of the few things that LLMs are actually good at.

Does anyone read more than the headline? OP even said this in the summary.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

It depends what purpose that paperwork is intended for.

If the regulatory paperwork it's managing is designed to influence behaviour, perhaps having an LLM do the work will make it less effective in that regard.

Learning and understanding is hard work. An LLM can't do that for you.

Sure it can summarise instructions for you to show you what's more pertinent in a given instance, but is that the same as someone who knows what to do because they've been wading around in the logs and regs for the last decade?

It seems like, whether you're using an LLM to write a business report, or a legal submission, or a SOP for running a nuclear reactor, it can be a great tool but requires high level knowledge on the part of the user to review the output.

As always, there's a risk that a user just won't identify a problem in the information produced.

I don't think this means LLMs should not be used in high risk roles, it just demonstrates the importance of robust policies surrounding their use.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I agree with you but you could see the slippery slope with the LLM returning incorrect/hallucinate data in the same way that is happening in the public space. It could be trivial for documentation until you realize the documentation could be critical for some processes.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

If you've never used a custom LLM or wrapper for regular ol' ChatGPT, a lot of what it can hallucinate gets stripped out and the entire corpus of data it's trained on is your data. Even then, the risk is pretty low here. Do you honestly think that a human has never made an error on paperwork?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

I do and even contained one do return hallucination or incorrect data. So it depends on the application that you use it. It is for a quick summary / data search why not? But if it is for some operational process that might be problematic.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

NOOOOOO ITS DOING NUCLEAR PHYSICS!!!!!!!!111

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It's eating the rods, it's eating the ions!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I unfortunately don't can someone explain?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Oh shit had already forgotten about this amid so many other scandals. The guy who said this is running the whole of US like a fucking medieval kingdom, another reality slap in the face. At that time I was like, "surely no one right in the mind would vote for this scammer".

[–] [email protected] 62 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Huh, it is really Russian roulette with how we're all gonna die, could be WW3, could be another pandemic or could a bunch of AIs hallucinating and causing multiple nuclear meltdowns.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It’s literally just a document search for their internal employees to use.

Those employees are fallible humans trying to navigate tens of thousands of byzantine technical and regulatory documents all published on various dinosaur platforms.

AI hallucination is a very popular thing to get outraged about right now but don’t forget about good old fashioned bureaucratic error.

My employer implemented AI search/summarization of our docs/wiki/intranet/JIRA systems over a year ago and it has been very effective in my experience. It always links to the source docs, but it permits natural language queries and can do some reasoning about the contents of the documents to pull together information across a sea of text.

Nothing that is mission critical enough to lead to a reactor meltdown should ever be blindly trusted to these tools.

But nothing like that should ever be trusted to the whims of one fallible human, either. This is why systems have protocols, checks and balances, quality controls, and failsafes.

Giving employees a more powerful document search doesn’t somehow sweep all that aside.

But hey, don’t let a rational, down-to-earth argument stand in the way of freaking out about a sci-fi dystopia.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

Don’t forget he inevitable climate change.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

I can only hope my bingo card somehow explodes & kills me.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago
[–] [email protected] 48 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The LLM told me that control rods were not necessary, so it must be true

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago

The chatbot said 3.6 Roentgen is just fine and the core cannot have exploded, maybe we heard a truck driving by

[–] [email protected] 42 points 2 days ago
[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Finally we get the sequel to "Chernobyl" ... Based in America...

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago

Live action at that

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

They made the prequel already - wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 days ago

Diablo Canyon

The nuclear power plant run by AI slop is located in a region called "Diablo Canyon".

Right. We sure this isn't an Onion article? ...actually no, it couldn't be, The Onion's writers aren't that lazy.

Fuckin whatever, I'm done for the night. Gonna head over to Mr. Sandman's squishy rectangle. ...bet you'll never guess what I'm gonna do there!!

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 days ago

Can we not have the lying bots teaching people how to run a nuclear plant?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago (5 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

using AI in a nuclear plant at Diablo Canyon... it's so on the nose you'd say it's lazy writing if it were part of the backstory of some scifi novel.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

to people who say it's just paperwork or whatever it doesn't matter: this is how it begins. they'll save a couple cents here and there and they'll want to expand this.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Also, it's not like the paperwork isn't important.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (3 children)

That’s textbook slippery slope logical fallacy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Slippery slope arguments aren't inherently fallicious.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

it's not actually. there's barely an intermediate step between what's happening now and what I'm suggesting it will lead to.

this is not "if we allow gay marriage people will start marrying goats". it's "if this company is allowed to cut corners here they'll be cutting corners in other places". that's not a slope; it's literally the next step.

slippery slope fallacy doesn't mean you're not allowed to connect A to B.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You may think it’s as plausible as you like. Obviously you do or you wouldn’t have said it. It’s still by definition absolutely a slippery slope logical fallacy. A little will always lead to more, therefore a little is a lot. This is textbook. It has nothing to do with companies, computers, or goats.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago

this is textbook fallacy fallacy

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

True, but it you change the argument from "this will happen" to "this with happen more frequently" then it's still a very reasonable observation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

All predictions in this vein are invalid.

If you want to say “even this little bit is unsettling and we should be on guard for more,” fine.

That’s different from “if you think this is only a small amount you are wrong because a small amount will become a large amount.”

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

What could possibly go wrong?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

Fucking christ..

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

SkyNet is fully operational, operating at 60 teraflops.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Dave, I don't known what to tell you but you can't come in alright?

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

One "Oops!" and humanity's gone for...

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Tell me you misunderstood what the article was about without telling me that you misunderstood what the article was about

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Brother, it's a good day to avoid laughing at a bad joke but at least understanding that it WAS a joke. Have a good day, brother..🫂