By Jorge Mercado Thursday, March 14th, 2024

For nearly two decades, Trey Lauderdale was looking to streamline healthcare communications by having the industry adopt new technological advances to establish better clinical communication practices.  

Now, he is attempting to do the same in the nuclear energy space.

On March 11, Lauderdale and his company, Atomic Canyon, emerged from stealth and unveiled its platform, Neutron, their custom-built AI search platform for the nuclear energy sector.

“If you live in San Luis Obispo, you can’t help but run into people who work at Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. It’s one of the biggest employers in our region,” Lauderdale, who moved to SLO about three years ago, told the Business Times March 13.

“And as I started talking and just meeting people randomly who worked at Diablo, I became really fascinated by nuclear power and started doing more and more research and quickly realized that the science of nuclear power is just unbelievable.”

Atomic Canyon aims to harness the power of its AI platform to improve efficiency, modernize the regulatory approval process, and streamline workflows.

Lauderdale said the program, Neutron, was made possible by downloading 52 million pages of publicly available Nuclear Regulatory Commission data.

“With Neutron any nuclear power plant, or small modular reactor, can use this to access and search the publicly available ADAMS database but in a very kind of effective and friendly way, which makes it really easy for them to find the information they’re looking for,” Lauderdale said.

Currently, the Neutron program is free of charge. Lauderdale said the reason for this is because it allows people to see the power of what their AI platform could do and gain the trust from industry experts.

“We want to prove that we can come in and leverage this technology to help advance the nuclear industry and the free product does that,” he said.

“From there, we’ll look at kind of monetization strategies as we engage with some of these enterprises and add even more value on top of the current new Neutron platform.”

The timing of this company also comes at an interesting part of the nuclear industry life cycle.

The Central Coast is home to California’s last remaining power plant — Diablo Canyon. 

Though it was set to go offline beginning in 2024, the life of the plant was extended five years by Gov. Gavin Newsom in an effort for the state to meet not only its energy output needed for the people but also its carbon-free energy needs.

Currently, Diablo Canyon provides about 9% of the state’s electricity supply and is the state’s largest power plant and producer of clean energy, generating enough carbon-free electricity to meet the needs of three million people.

Still, there are many people against the idea of the nuclear plant.

San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace, as well as other anti-nuclear organizations, have filed various petitions over the past couple of years with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission expressing concerns that the plant should be shut down due to the risk of damaging earthquakes and the possibility of cracking equipment, which could lead to a disaster. 

Knowing those concerns, Lauderdale still believes in the net positive of harnessing nuclear energy for its clean power.

“I think one of the biggest risks that we face is this oncoming issue of climate change. We’re not meeting our goals, we are not slowing down global warming and we are putting out all of these gases,” Lauderdale said.

“AI is talked about a lot and it is really transformational, but what we see happening is we’re having to open up all these data centers that use a ton of energy and if we continue going down this path of consuming more energy, it just feels like to me that nuclear power is the absolute best path for us to look at creating a world where we have not only just energy but from a clean energy perspective as well.”

An entrepreneur at heart, this is not Lauderdale’s first attempt at building a winning company. 

In 2008 he founded Voalte, a clinical communication software company.

By 2019, he sold the company for $180 million to Hill-Rom, which was later sold two years later for $10.5 billion. 

At the time of Hill-Rom’s sale, Lauderdale knew he wanted to start somewhere else, so he and his wife and two kids moved to San Luis Obispo in 2021.

Just two years later, in December 2023, he founded Atomic Canyon. That same month, the United States joined a multinational declaration to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050 to support global climate and energy security goals. 

“That’s when a light bulb really went off in my head that oh my goodness, like there is a tremendous opportunity in this kind of resurgence of nuclear,” Lauderdale said.

From the sale of his last company Lauderdale, along with co-founder and Chief AI Architect Kristian Kielhofner, has been able to bootstrap the company so far, hiring about two dozen employees in just a few months.

Lauderdale said the plan is to continue hiring, scaling and even opening an office in San Luis Obispo when the time is right.

Asked about the difficulty in helping an industry transition to adopting more technology, Lauderdale said he embraces the challenge.

“We come from healthcare. We understand technology transition in large enterprises and we’re not afraid to go in and roll up our sleeves and put work alongside these organizations to help them through that transformational process in bite-sized chunks, one step at a time,” he said.

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