Working to Automate Nuclear Plant Operations

vetted autonomous operations will help.

A primary question was: “How do we transition to autonomous operations in nuclear power plants?” Fortier wanted one integrated approach, a central supervisory control system instead of many interlinked parts. While a legitimate requirement, the challenge here was in modifying operations that were primarily meant for humans to now also include machines.

Fortier realized that no matter how thorough the framework for a supervisory control system, its scope would be severely limited if its rigidity couldn’t accommodate both humans and machines. “Because everything is human-centric, it doesn’t allow you to choose the best way to do a procedure,” Fortier observes. What if, instead, humans and computers could tag-team and do what each does best, with strategic human intervention only delivered as necessary?

MIT-Facilitated Collaborations
The goal was elegant, but its scope extended far beyond a master’s thesis. A doctorate seemed like a natural progression, so Fortier has continued her research toward a PhD after completing her master’s in 2025.

It was in pursuit of autonomous operations that Fortier discovered the power of collaborations at MIT. Her research advisor, Sacit Cetiner, has a joint appointment with MIT’s Nuclear Reactor Laboratory and the Idaho National Laboratory (INL). To address the challenge of devising an autonomous supervisory control system with an effective and easily adopted human-machine interface, Fortier worked with Katya Le Blanc, a senior human factors scientist at INL. A collaboration with the Human System Simulation Laboratory at INL helped Fortier develop a better understanding of designing cyber-physical systems.

“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 says.

She also availed of collaborations with Westinghouse, a leading design organization and vendor for current- and next-generation nuclear power plants — Fortier completed a summer internship there in 2025 — to test drive ideas she had about autonomous operations solutions.

At MIT, Fortier learned control theory from one of her co-advisors, Anuradha Annaswamy, a 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