REQUEST FOR INFORMATION (RFI)
Reviewing Smarter: AI Tools for Building International Nuclear Regulatory Capacity
1. Purpose and Background
This Request for Information (RFI) seeks to identify and assess commercially available, mature artificial intelligence (AI) tools that can accelerate and strengthen the international regulatory interface between the applicant and the regulator throughout the nuclear licensing process. This is a two-sided opportunity: tools that support the applicant in preparing, mapping, and submitting license application content across jurisdictions, and tools that support the regulator in reviewing, relating, and adjudicating that content rigorously and independently. The objective is to enable a faster, higher-quality regulatory interface for both parties, drawing on U.S. regulatory precedent and applicable national law.
Historically, design certification and combined license review can take years. The aim of this initiative is to accelerate licensing activities by years, compressing review, research, and drafting timelines, while ensuring a safe, traceable, and defensible regulatory interface and review. Acceleration must not come at the expense of rigor, explainability, or independent regulatory judgment; outputs must remain fully cited, auditable, and grounded in source documents so that both the applicant and the regulator can rely on them with confidence.
This RFI is not a Request for Proposal (RFP) and does not commit the issuing authority to procure any product or service. It is intended to inform a potential subsequent pilot and deployment pathway.
2. Scope of Interest
The issuing authority is interested in AI tools and platforms that support international regulator's licensing review function, including but not limited to:
- Intelligent search and discovery across large repositories of technical, safety, and licensing documentation
- Understanding and relating requirements, guidance, licensing precedent, and prior regulatory reviews
- Identification of resolved topics, open items, and novel or safety-significant issues for prioritized review
- Mapping of national/U.S. licensing bases to IAEA and Western European Nuclear Regulators Association requirements
- Automated drafting and generation of review-supporting documentation, with full citation and source traceability
- Explainable reasoning, with every output traceable to source documents
- Other capabilities as relevant for international regulator and/or applicant assistance
Tools must be applicable across the full range of reactor classes including microreactors, small modular reactors (SMRs), advanced non-light-water reactors, new large light water reactors, and existing reactor upgrades.
3. Mandatory Eligibility Criteria
We are seeking respondents who can demonstrate the following capabilities.
- Nuclear AI experience. Demonstrated, deployed experience applying AI specifically to nuclear energy, licensing, compliance, or safety documentation (commercial, national laboratory, or regulatory deployments). Academic or purely conceptual claims do not satisfy this criterion.
- U.S. regulatory pedigree. Tool has been developed, validated, deployed, or otherwise substantively engaged with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and/or U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), or a U.S. national laboratory operating under DOE/NRC frameworks. Respondents must describe the nature and current status of that engagement.
- Reactor-class coverage. Demonstrated applicability across reactor types from micro to large (see Section 2).
- Security and sovereignty. Ability to deploy within various international sovereign cloud tenant or otherwise meet the issuing authority's data residency, security, and confidentiality requirements.
- Availability for live demonstration within the RFI period (see Section 6).
4. Information Requested
Respondents should address each of the following. Brevity and specificity are valued over marketing material.
A. Company and Eligibility
- Company overview, ownership, and relevant nuclear/regulatory clients
- Evidence against each mandatory eligibility criterion in Section 3
- DOE/NRC and national laboratory engagements, with status and points of contact where permissible
B. Capability
- Description of the tool, its core AI architecture, and what is purpose-built for nuclear vs. general-purpose
- How the tool handles requirements, guidance, precedent, and regulatory review relationships
- How outputs are cited, traced to source, and made explainable/auditable
- Cross-framework mapping capability (national law, U.S. precedent, IAEA, WENRA)
- Reactor-class applicability with concrete examples
C. Evidence of Performance
- Quantified outcomes from real deployments (e.g., time/effort reduction, with baseline and method)
- Minimum of one named case study or reference deployment
- Accuracy, validation approach, and how errors/hallucinations are detected and controlled
D. Deployment and Integration
- Hosting and sovereign cloud options across international regions; data handling, residency, and security posture
- Document ingestion approach (public first, internal/restricted later) and access controls
- Systems integration approach and ability to deploy at scale
- Approximate timeline from pilot to production
E. Pilot Concept
- Down-selected organizations will have the opportunity to work together to approach potential international and domestic partners and assess their interest in participating in this program.
- Responses should identify potential pilot concept opportunities, including use cases where applicable, together with what the respondent would need, the expected duration, and the success metrics by which the pilot would be evaluated.
F. Commercial (Indicative Only)
- Indicative licensing/cost model and pilot cost range (non-binding)
5. Response Format and Page Limits
- Written response: Maximum 15 pages, PDF, excluding the case study appendix.
- One supporting artifact (e.g., recorded walkthrough, architecture one-pager, or sample cited output) is permitted and encouraged.
- A written document alone is not a complete response. Each eligible respondent must also commit to a live demonstration (Section 6).
- Submit to: Chase.Egbert@inl.gov by July 8, 2026
6. Live Demonstration
Some respondents may be requested to deliver a live demonstration which would follow a format such as the following:
- Format: 60-minute live session, in person at later determined location and/or via secure video.
- Content: Demonstration must use a representative, non-trivial nuclear licensing scenario. Where feasible and agreed, the issuing authority may provide a sample document set in advance so respondents demonstrate on the regulator's own material rather than canned demos.
- Demonstration criteria, live in real time:
- Applicability to international partners deploying nuclear energy for the first time
- Ingestion or search across a realistic technical document set
- A regulatory review task end to end (e.g., locate, relate, and assess a requirement against precedent)
- Citation and source traceability for every answer
- Identification of open items / novel or safety-significant issues
- Handling of an unscripted question posed by the evaluation panel
- Q&A: Minimum 20 minutes of unscripted Q&A with the evaluation panel, at our discretion.
8. General Assessment Approach
Responses and demonstrations will be assessed against, at minimum:
- Nuclear-specific capability and accuracy: fitness for regulatory review
- Traceability and explainability: every output cited and auditable
- Live demonstration performance: including unscripted Q&A
- Deployment feasibility and sovereignty: security, data residency, scale
- Evidence of real-world performance: quantified, referenced outcomes
- Pilot readiness: quality and realism of proposed scoped pilot
9. Anticipated Path Forward
Subject to the outcome of this RFI, the issuing authority anticipates:
- Formal solicitation and award process which would be anticipated to include final requirements and necessary terms and conditions.
- Scoped pilot on the regulator's own documents and review process with one or more respondents.
- Full deployment in the regulator's sovereign cloud tenant as the production end state, supported through existing bilateral nuclear cooperation frameworks.
10. Miscellaneous
- This RFI does not obligate the issuing authority to issue an RFP, conduct a pilot, or make any award.
- All costs of responding, including demonstrations, are borne by the respondent.
- Submissions may be treated as confidential to the extent permitted by applicable law; respondents must mark proprietary content.
- The issuing authority may request clarifications, decline to assess or respond to non-conforming responses, and amend or cancel this RFI at any time.
- All information provided by the issuing authority, including any document set, is confidential and to be used solely for this RFI.
11. Point of Contact
All questions and submissions shall be submitted to Katya Le Blanc at Katya.LeBlanc@inl.gov and Chase Egbert chase.egbert@inl.gov by July 8, 2026.
