Nuclear Engineering Interface Architecture (NEIA): A Classification Framework for Nuclear Energy Integration and Deployment Feasibility

The deployment of nuclear energy systems across diverse industrial and grid applications is constrained by mismatches between reactor capabilities, application requirements, and integration architectures. Existing approaches evaluate projects on a case-by-case basis, resulting in inconsistent comparisons and non-standardized decision processes.

This paper introduces the Nuclear Engineering Interface Architecture (NEIA), a classification-based framework that organizes nuclear energy integration into structured classes representing demand characteristics, reactor capabilities, integration architectures, and resulting system configurations.

The NEIA framework provides a consistent vocabulary for describing nuclear energy applications and enables identification of feasible deployment pathways, compatible reactor classes, and integration complexity. The framework is conceptual and classification-based, supporting early-stage planning, technology screening, and structured comparison across nuclear energy applications.