Accelerating Nuclear Supply Chain Innovation and Knowledge Management through AI-Driven Digital Transformation
Foreword
Prof. Nawal K Prinja
The United Kingdom has a proud nuclear heritage as the home of the world’s first commercial nuclear power station. Today, that legacy is being connected to the future through purposeful digital transformation. Sellafield Ltd is streamlining standards governance across its extensive supply chain by deploying Accuris Engineering Workbench (EWB), ensuring that partners work to the latest, standards and receive targeted alerts when requirements change.
In parallel, the United Kingdom National Nuclear Laboratory is unlocking the value of decades of technical reports and archival material with Accuris Goldfire, making historical data discoverable at speed and at scale so it can inform present decisions and reduce reinvention. This ability to surface the right insight at the right moment for the right people is essential as the sector advances towards Advanced Modular Reactors (AMRs) and Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and embraces modern manufacturing routes. There are areas where emerging Advanced Manufacturing (AM) technologies may not yet be fully codified, and where careful interpretation of existing codes and standards remains critical.
Equally pivotal is the digitalisation of requirements engineering in applying Accuris Thread to automate the identification, classification, and traceability of regulatory and technical requirements – accelerating early design phases while strengthening compliance and assurance in the development of Small Modular Reactor design.
In parallel, the United Kingdom National Nuclear Laboratory is unlocking the value of decades of technical reports and archival material with Accuris Goldfire, making historical data discoverable at speed and at scale so it can inform present decisions and reduce reinvention. This ability to surface the right insight at the right moment for the right people is essential as the sector advances towards Advanced Modular Reactors (AMRs) and Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and embraces modern manufacturing routes. There are areas where emerging Advanced Manufacturing (AM) technologies may not yet be fully codified, and where careful interpretation of existing codes and standards remains critical.
Equally pivotal is the digitalisation of requirements engineering in applying Accuris Thread to automate the identification, classification, and traceability of regulatory and technical requirements – accelerating early design phases while strengthening compliance and assurance in the development of Small Modular Reactor design.
Together, these initiatives demonstrate how the nuclear sector in the UK is coupling its nuclear experience with AIenabled tools to raise the bar on safety, compliance, and delivery performance. By embedding current standards, preserving institutional knowledge, and industrialising requirements management, the sector is building the digital foundations needed to deliver the next generation of clean, secure nuclear power – safely, efficiently, and with confidence.
Executive Summary
The UK’s nuclear sector is undergoing a significant digital transformation, driven by advanced AI platforms that enhance efficiency, compliance and innovation across key organizations.
Sellafield Ltd. has implemented Accuris Engineering Workbench (EWB) to streamline access to their engineering standards across its vast supply chain of over 43,000 employees, partners and contractors. EWB uses AI and natural language processing (NLP) to deliver real-time updates, dynamic links to referenced standards and intuitive search capabilities. This has led to measurable improvements in compliance, reduced search times and enhanced cross-industry collaboration.
United Kingdom National Nuclear Laboratory (UKNNL) has adopted Accuris Goldfire, an AI-powered knowledge management platform to unlock its archive of over 100 million documents. Goldfire enables rapid, intelligent search and contextual linking across data repositories, delivering results ten times faster than traditional methods. This has been successfully applied to strategic projects including AMR Knowledge Capture, Dragon Reactor analysis and NDA estate planning. These initiatives have recovered critical historical data, improved metadata generation and enhanced information security which supports the UK’s clean energy transition.
A Global Leader in Nuclear SMR Technology is leveraging Accuris Thread to modernize requirements engineering as it develops its SMR (Small Modular Reactor) design. Traditionally manual and error-prone the process of extracting regulatory requirements is now automated using AI and machine learning. Thread identifies, classifies and enriches requirements with metadata, enabling faster processing, improved accuracy (up to 90%), and better traceability. This supports safer and more compliant reactor design and aligns with the UK’s nuclear innovation goals.
Accuris Engineering Workbench Powers Digital Standards for Sellafield’s Supply Chain
The Client
The Challenge
Sellafield requires that all suppliers adhere strictly to national and international standards, as well as Sellafield’s own internal engineering standards. Ensuring this level of compliance across a diverse supply chain is critical to maintaining safety, security, and operational integrity. Ensuring that users throughout the supply chain have easy access to the relevant up-to-date information has been a challenge.
Fig [1] Accuris EWB delivers Sellafield engineering standards and guides to their supply chain.
Solution
Accuris Engineering Workbench (EWB) offers supply chain access to Sellafield engineering standards and guides.
The Outcome
Before this solution was implemented, the Sellafield standards administrator was required to control access to standards on an individual basis. The platform used had quite limited search functionality, with none of the advanced tools included in EWB.
To help address this challenge Sellafield has adopted a digital engineering (EWB) platform developed by Accuris, which provides advanced tools to promote the consistent application of codes and standards throughout their supply chain. Users in each company may create their own accounts, supported by Accuris Customer Care if required, reducing the administration burden on Sellafield Ltd.
Using Accuris internal standards management solution
The Impact
Accuris Goldfire supports efficient delivery of Internal knowledge across UKNNL
The nuclear sector faces a critical challenge in accessing and leveraging its vast knowledge base, which spans several decades and multiple organisations. With approximately 100 million documents at UKNNL, some dating back to the 1940s, conventional search methods prove time-consuming and impractical when trying to locate specific technical information. This challenge is compounded by workforce demographics where researchers associated with foundational programmes are not always still available to contact about projects creating knowledge gaps that could lead to costly rework and programme delays. The volume and complexity of information presents both a significant opportunity to accelerate nuclear technology development and a substantial barrier to efficient knowledge sharing across the sector. That’s why UKNNL are using Goldfire to ensure that historical knowledge can be captured and easily accessed, searched and shared.
Goldfire has enabled UKNNL to deliver on multiple projects of national importance including:
1. Advanced Modular Reactor Knowledge Capture (AMR KC) Project (August 2025)
Project Overview: Funded by DESNZ and delivered in partnership with Arup, this project aims to utilise the UK’s historical knowledge of Advanced Nuclear Technologies (ANTs) to de-risk the AMR programme.
Goldfire Application
This project directly supports the UK’s AMR programme by preventing the loss of critical historical knowledge and enabling faster, more cost-effective development of advanced reactor technologies. It positions the UK to lead in next-generation nuclear technology deployment.
The Outcome
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Potential Impact
This project directly supports the UK’s AMR programme by preventing the loss of critical historical knowledge and enabling faster, more cost-effective development of advanced reactor technologies. It positions the UK to lead in next-generation nuclear technology deployment.
2. Dragon Reactor Programme Analysis
Project Overview: Analysis of information relating to the Dragon Reactor programme as part of High Temperature Gas Reactor (HTGR) technology development.
Goldfire Application
The system was used to develop search strategies and understand the information landscape, including distribution of knowledge, key topics, and authors. Searches were directed towards web-based sources and patent libraries.
The Outcome
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Potential Impact
3. Nuclear Decommissioning and Waste Management Applications
Project Overview: Supporting decommissioning planning and workforce up-skilling across the nuclear sector, particularly relevant to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) estate work.
Goldfire Application
The system has been used to support decommissioning planning by providing access to historical operational experience, technology assessments, and regulatory information spanning several decades.
The Outcome
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Accuris Thread enables rapid and accurate requirements decomposition for Small Modular Reactor development program.
The Client
A Global Leader in Nuclear SMR Technology with a unrivalled track record in the design of complex power generation solutions/equipment is developing a Small Modular Reactor (SMR) for the UK, European & global energy markets.
The Challenge
Regulations and industry standards play a critical role in the safe design, construction and operation of these next generation of nuclear plants. Early in the design process, experts spend considerable time & efforts to consolidate & validate a baseline of regulations and standards that the plant will be designed to. This is a critical step to ensure the plant can be licensed to be operated in a given region. Once a consolidated baseline has been established, subject matter experts start on the time-consuming effort of reading through each of the listed standards to identify individual requirements from within those documents. Figure [3] below illustrates this challenge that is faced by engineers when they read through a standard or specification to identify requirements that they must take into consideration.
The Solution
Accuris Thread is a cloud-based solution that extracts requirements from engineering content, provides insights and integrates this information into other applications while preserving the context of the source material. Accuris Thread allows you to streamline requirements definition with automated requirements identification, extraction, and comparison.
The Outcome
Using Thread
Accuris Thread takes advantage of latest advances in AI & Machine learning so it is now possible to identify and classify individual clauses & statements within a standard or specification to a high degree of accuracy with a set of appropriate tags.
Classification tags such as “Requirements” and “Prohibitions” are then applied and used to help aggregate requirements that must be included as part of a project or contract. Further enrichment is performed to the documents so that requirement statements may be associated with document hierarchy & additional meta data such as materials, equipment & references. This enables the engineering team to collect requirements pertaining to a particular system, part or even material or performance characteristic.
11 Up to 90% time saved when identifying, extracting, and defining requirements Finally, each requirement or prohibition that the design teams have identified can then be exported into downstream systems or shared with appropriate teams or suppliers. Initially this is done by exporting to a required file format. These exported requirements can then be ingested into formal requirements management systems or may be worked on outside of the Thread application.
The Impact
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