Mapping out the nation’s nuclear power
Nuclear engineering Ph.D. student Dan Watson built an online tool that gathers public data into an interactive dashboard that visualizes nuclear power plants across the United States.
A new online interactive map hosted by a Texas A&M University research lab gives a clear and frequently updated picture of the number and performance of nuclear power plants across the country.
While working on his dissertation regarding artificial intelligence applications in nuclear development areas, Ph.D. student Dan Watson built an online dashboard for the Advanced Energy Systems Laboratory (AESL) in the nuclear engineering department that shows up-to-date information about current nuclear energy availability.
The interactive dashboard displays each nuclear power plant across the United States, color-coded by what level of maximum power the reactor is producing at the time. This project supports Watson’s doctoral research funded through the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Consortium for Enabling Technologies and Innovation.
Clicking on any given power plant provides more details, including its age, power capacity, past performance, type of reactor, and the latest information from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), such as inspection reports and license amendments. Those public documents from the NRC database are directly linked from the dashboard. The tool could be used to inform the public about nearby nuclear reactors, help contractors and consultants identify current plant outages and anticipate upcoming outages, and allow researchers to easily monitor nuclear facilities.
“It makes the data very accessible,” Watson said. “You don’t have to dig too deep. Some people don’t know how to navigate in these regulatory repositories and find this information. It’s all right there.”
Watson used Claude Code — an agentic coding tool developed by Anthropic — to help him build the dashboard’s codebase and interface with public data from the NRC website.
The NRC has an abundance of up-to-date public data, and the information database is set up in a way that makes it easy for outside programmers to connect applications. However, all this information can be hard to sort through, and the NRC doesn’t have a visual way to present it like Watson’s dashboard.
“It’s a visualization of already available public information to showcase how important nuclear power contributions are for our nation’s sustainable and independent energy future,” said Watson’s advisor Pavel Tsvetkov, nuclear engineering professor and the director of the AESL. “The tool shows how industry unleashes nuclear power, its impact today, and its potential for the future nationally and globally.”
AESL also recently developed a model context protocol server, another way to utilize the public information from the NRC. This server provides AI agents with tools to search and gather information from the agency’s document repository, known as the Agencywide Documents Access and Management System (ADAMS).
In the next phase, Watson is working to add information about future nuclear power plants to the dashboard as details become available from the companies building them.
Visualizations of nuclear power are important for educating people interested in nuclear energy, according to Tsvetkov. As an example, he noted such a tool could be useful at outreach events like January’s Nuclear Open House, hosted by the Texas A&M University System, the Texas Engineering Experiment Station (TEES), and the Department of Nuclear Engineering.
“I thought this would be a great way to communicate to the broader public how invested the AESL is in energy systems,” he said.
