How Ontologies Help Nuclear Scale to Meet Global Energy Demand

This article explores how ontologies can address the knowledge management challenges facing nuclear power plants as the U.S. enters a nuclear renaissance.

• •The ADVANCE Act and executive orders are accelerating nuclear expansion, targeting a shift from 100GW to 400GW capacity, but the experienced workforce is shrinking ~10% annually
• •Experienced engineers carry critical implicit knowledge (plant configurations, failure signatures, licensing constraints) that retires with them and cannot scale to meet new demand
• •An ontology makes plant relationships explicit and queryable by defining entities (systems, components, sensors, documents) and their connections as RDF triples with rules enforced via SHACL
• •Key capabilities required: canonical identity resolution across naming conventions, explicit relationship traversal (e.g., valve → train → isolation boundary → EQ constraints), and traceable sourcing of asset constraints back to technical specifications