For nuclear energy to truly fulfill its promise as a vital, carbon-free power source in the global clean energy transition, it must overcome significant economic hurdles. The imperative is clear: nuclear power must be competitively priced and demonstrably economical to produce and operate. At the forefront of addressing this challenge is Lauren Fortier, a second-year doctoral student in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), whose groundbreaking research is focused on developing remote operation protocols for the autonomous control of nuclear plants, promising to revolutionize the industry’s economic model.
Fortier’s journey into the intricate world of nuclear operations is as compelling as her current research. A graduate of Northwestern University with a degree in materials science and engineering, obtained through an ROTC scholarship, her initial foray into the field was intensely practical and high-stakes. She served as a supervisor for nuclear plant operations aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier, navigating the strategic waters of the South China Sea. This experience offered an unparalleled perspective on the absolute reliability required of nuclear power. "It was a unique experience that you don’t easily see anywhere else, especially the complete reliance on nuclear power. The only way you’re moving through the ocean is if you have that nuclear reactor working," Fortier recounts, highlighting the critical role nuclear propulsion plays in sustained naval operations in contested territories.
During her tenure as a naval nuclear operator, Fortier developed a profound appreciation for the operational aspects of nuclear technology, delving into the underlying scientific principles. Simultaneously, she gained firsthand insight into the industry’s operational inefficiencies. She observed that many plant operations were extraordinarily manually intensive, prompting her to ponder how these processes could be streamlined and made less reliant on constant human intervention. This formative experience laid the groundwork for her academic pursuits, sparking a vision for a more efficient, automated future for nuclear power.
Transitioning from Naval Operations to Academic Innovation
Around the time these critical questions were crystallizing, the U.S. Navy presented Fortier with an opportunity to pursue a master’s degree in an approved discipline. Building on her overwhelmingly positive experiences in nuclear operations, she chose nuclear engineering at MIT, viewing it as a natural extension of her service. "My experiences in nuclear up until then had been overwhelmingly positive, so I thought I would build on them and move from the operations realm to the academic realm," Fortier explains. The rigorous training she received in the Navy proved to be an invaluable foundation, preparing her for the intense academic demands at MIT.
For her master’s thesis, Fortier embarked on developing a supervisory control system designed for nuclear plant operations. Her work involved extensive simulations using a system with robust thermal hydraulic responses, operating on the premise that insights garnered from these simulations would be directly applicable to real-world scenarios. This initial research, however, soon revealed itself to be merely the prelude to a much larger, more complex endeavor.
The Drive for Autonomous Nuclear Plant Operations: A Paradigm Shift
The full scope of the challenge — and the immense potential — became apparent as Fortier delved deeper. The future viability of nuclear power, particularly for achieving widespread decarbonization, increasingly points towards the deployment of smaller, more distributed plants, often located in rural or remote areas. These include advanced reactor designs like Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and microreactors, which offer scalability and flexibility previously unachievable with traditional gigawatt-scale facilities.
Historically, legacy nuclear plants have relied on intensive manual operations, a model that has been economically viable due to their immense output and the ability to operate at 100 percent capacity, justifying the substantial costs associated with maintaining a large, highly specialized staff. However, the economic calculus changes dramatically for distributed microreactors. Operating at a smaller scale and often in remote locations, these facilities cannot afford the same extensive human footprint. This is precisely where supervised and thoroughly vetted autonomous operations become not just beneficial, but essential for economic competitiveness and broad deployment.
The core question driving Fortier’s doctoral research became: "How do we transition to autonomous operations in nuclear power plants?" Her vision was for an integrated, central supervisory control system, moving away from a patchwork of interlinked, disparate components. The challenge lay in fundamentally redesigning operations that were inherently human-centric to seamlessly incorporate machine capabilities.
Fortier recognized a critical limitation: any supervisory control system, no matter how meticulously designed, would be severely constrained if its architecture was too rigid to accommodate both human and machine operators effectively. "Because everything is human-centric, it doesn’t allow you to choose the best way to do a procedure," Fortier observes. Her research seeks to move beyond this limitation, envisioning a collaborative "tag-team" approach where humans and computers leverage their respective strengths, with strategic human intervention deployed only when absolutely necessary. This human-machine teaming approach is crucial for safety-critical industries, ensuring optimal performance while maintaining robust oversight.
The Economic Imperative and Global Context of Nuclear Energy
The push for autonomous nuclear operations is underscored by a broader global context of energy demand and climate action. Nuclear power, with its high-capacity factor and zero-emission profile, is increasingly recognized as a crucial component of a diversified clean energy portfolio. However, its high upfront capital costs and lengthy construction timelines have historically been barriers to wider adoption. SMRs and microreactors, designed for factory fabrication and modular construction, aim to reduce these costs and accelerate deployment. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), nuclear power already provides about 10% of the world’s electricity and roughly a quarter of all low-carbon electricity. Projections suggest that to meet ambitious decarbonization targets, nuclear capacity may need to double by 2050, with SMRs playing a significant role in achieving this growth, particularly in regions where large-scale plants are not feasible.
The Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) for new nuclear builds remains a challenge, often higher than that of solar or wind, though nuclear offers unparalleled reliability and baseload power. Fortier’s work directly addresses the operational cost component, which, alongside capital costs, dictates nuclear’s overall economic competitiveness. By reducing the human staffing requirements, her research aims to significantly lower operational expenditures, making nuclear power more attractive to investors and utilities. This is particularly relevant for microreactors, which might serve isolated communities, military bases, or industrial applications, where the cost of maintaining a full human crew round-the-clock would be prohibitive.
MIT-Facilitated Collaborations: A Nexus of Expertise
The ambitious scope of Fortier’s vision for autonomous operations clearly extended beyond a master’s thesis, making a doctorate a logical next step. She has continued her research towards a PhD, slated for completion after her master’s in 2025. This complex endeavor has thrived on the power of interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaborations, a hallmark of research at MIT.
Her primary research advisor, Sacit Cetiner, holds a joint appointment with MIT’s Nuclear Reactor Laboratory and the Idaho National Laboratory (INL). This dual affiliation has been instrumental, providing Fortier access to world-class facilities and diverse expertise. To tackle the intricate challenge of designing an autonomous supervisory control system with an effective and easily adoptable human-machine interface, Fortier collaborated with Katya Le Blanc, a senior human factors scientist at INL. This partnership was crucial for integrating human behavioral insights into engineering design. Furthermore, a collaboration with the Human System Simulation Laboratory at INL provided Fortier with a deeper understanding of designing complex cyber-physical systems, where the interaction between digital controls and physical processes is paramount.
"I’m very much an engineer and don’t have a lot of experience in human behavior, so the collaboration with INL was a huge benefit for me. I got better insights into many aspects, including what you want to see when a human has to take over for a machine when it’s no longer working," Fortier explains. This highlights the critical importance of human factors engineering in safety-critical automation, ensuring that human operators can effectively monitor, intervene, and recover from automation failures.
Beyond INL, Fortier extended her collaborative network to industry, completing a summer internship in 2025 with Westinghouse, a leading design organization and vendor for both current and next-generation nuclear power plants. This invaluable experience allowed her to test and refine her ideas about autonomous operations solutions within a real-world industrial context, gaining feedback from seasoned professionals.
At MIT, Fortier benefited immensely from the guidance of her co-advisor, Anuradha Annaswamy, a distinguished founder and director of the Active-Adaptive Control Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. "She’s a control systems expert, which really benefits me because while I can explain what to do with a nuclear power plant, she can help me understand better how to go about operations from a control systems perspective," Fortier notes. Annaswamy advises Fortier on the foundational framework and execution of her supervisory control system, while Fortier concurrently takes advanced courses in control systems to deepen her theoretical understanding. Another key co-advisor is Curtis Smith, the former director for INL’s Nuclear Safety and Regulatory Research Division, now the KEPCO Professor of the Practice of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT NSE. Smith’s extensive experience in nuclear safety and regulation provides crucial perspective on the practical implementation and regulatory pathways for Fortier’s innovations.
A Step-by-Step Progression Towards Trustworthy Autonomy
Fortier emphasizes that the operational systems she is developing are designed to incorporate a gradual and systematic move towards autonomy, critically focusing on building trust with users. "When we introduce an automated procedure that walks you step by step through what you would be doing anyway, it is reassuring and builds trust," Fortier points out. This incremental approach is vital in a highly conservative industry like nuclear power, where safety and reliability are paramount, and any new technology must undergo rigorous validation and acceptance.
Her doctoral work is centered on incorporating objective-oriented operations. This innovative approach allows a control system to dynamically generate the sequence of events required to achieve a specific operational objective, rather than strictly adhering to a predetermined, rigid operating procedure. This flexibility is key for adapting to varying plant conditions and optimizing performance.
A crucial aspect of Fortier’s research is her deliberate choice of automation technology. She is developing automation based on a process called finite state automata, which stands in stark contrast to opaque AI-driven systems due to its inherent transparency in execution. Finite state automata, a discrete event system, ensures that every action within the automation framework is event-driven. This means that actions are triggered by specific, verifiable conditions — "if this happens, do that" — allowing the system to adjust dynamically to current plant conditions and transition between various states or events with absolute clarity and predictability.
Fortier extensively studied finite state automata during an internship at INL in summer 2024. The advantages of this approach are profound for safety-critical applications. It addresses complex problems through conventional, deterministic automation, rather than relying on data-driven statistical approaches like machine learning. "We’re not using a data-driven statistical approach like machine learning because we do not yet have the tools to validate the operation of such systems," Fortier clarifies. This principled stance prioritizes verifiability and safety, acknowledging the current limitations in validating complex AI algorithms for nuclear plant control. The regulatory landscape for nuclear power is extremely stringent, and demonstrable transparency and predictability are non-negotiable requirements for any control system.
Future Impact and Broader Implications
The potential impact of Fortier’s work on developing automation for nuclear plants has already garnered significant recognition. She was among the winners of the 2025 Innovations in Nuclear Energy Research and Development Student Competition, sponsored by the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP). Further cementing her position as a rising star in the field, Fortier has been named a 2026–2027 MathWorks Engineering Fellow, an honor that will provide crucial support for continuing her advanced research. These accolades underscore the national importance and promising trajectory of her contributions.
The successful implementation of Fortier’s nuclear plant automation program on next-generation equipment, particularly SMRs and microreactors, is expected to provide the necessary traction for their widespread commercial development and deployment. By making these advanced reactors more economical to operate, her work removes a significant barrier to their adoption, accelerating the shift towards a decarbonized energy grid.
The immediate next steps involve scaling the supervisory control system, integrating insights gained from focused work on smaller aspects of control into a comprehensive framework. Fortier expresses genuine excitement about the path ahead and the transformative possibilities her research holds. "The collaborations with other people, and the relationships we have established with stakeholders, have really helped make an impact and supported the relevancy of the work," she reflects. "Sometimes when you’re stuck in your own bubble, that outside perspective is really useful." This collaborative spirit and outward-looking approach are essential for tackling grand challenges like global energy transition.
Lauren Fortier’s pioneering efforts in autonomous nuclear operations are poised to redefine the economic viability and operational efficiency of nuclear power, making it a more accessible and scalable clean energy solution for the 21st century. Her work bridges the gap between traditional manual operations and a future where advanced, trustworthy automation unlocks the full potential of nuclear energy, securing a cleaner, more reliable power supply for communities worldwide.
