NE Colloquium: Chris Ritter

AI for Nuclear Energy

Abstract

This presentation introduces the Genesis Mission, a nationwide effort led by the US Department of Energy to use artificial intelligence to speed up innovation in energy, science, and nuclear technology. Through projects across national laboratories, including Idaho National Laboratory (INL), the mission applies AI to improve reactor operations, discover and test new materials faster, and support national security goals. By combining advanced computing, large scientific datasets, and autonomous experimentation, researchers are working to make scientific progress happen much more quickly and at lower cost.

Several INL initiatives demonstrate how AI can reshape nuclear engineering. Examples include autonomous control demonstrations on research reactors, AI‑guided materials discovery pipelines that could shrink decades‑long qualification timelines, and new “AI‑first” approaches to designing and building nuclear systems. Early results show dramatic improvements in efficiency, data processing, and real‑world testing. Together, these efforts highlight how AI can help future nuclear engineers solve complex problems, accelerate clean energy development, and modernize the way nuclear technologies are created and deployed.

Biography

Division Director for Scientific Computing and Artificial Intelligence Chris Ritter is also the and Director of the Digital Integration Center of Excellence at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). His team of ~100 computational and data scientists are changing the world’s future with AI/ML, digital twinning, digital engineering, multi-physics, HPC, and digital thread technologies across a portfolio of nuclear energy, non-proliferation, semiconductor, and defense applications.

Ritter founded INL's nationally leading digital engineering team which grew from 0 to over ~57 of the nation’s top researchers and developers in digital science. His team led the first nuclear reactor digital twin, built the Deep Lynx open digital thread platform, developed the first autonomous non-nuclear microreactor, and is actively building multiple petabyte-scale digital thread platforms. Additionally, he is the national technical director for AI at the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy. Prior to INL, Ritter co-founded and led development of the #1 cloud-native MBSE tool, Innoslate, used in 107 counties across 2,000 companies around the world.