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Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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AI at work: Southern Nuclear’s adoption of Copilot agents drives fleet forward
Southern Nuclear is leading the charge in artificial intelligence integration, with employee-developed applications driving efficiencies in maintenance, operations, safety, and performance.
The tools span all roles within the company, with thousands of documented uses throughout the fleet, including improved maintenance efficiency, risk awareness in maintenance activities, and better-informed decision-making. The data-intensive process of preparing for and executing maintenance operations is streamlined by leveraging AI to put the right information at the fingertips for maintenance leaders, planners, schedulers, engineers, and technicians.
Keisuke Kobayashi, Kenji Nishihara
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 136 | Number 2 | October 2000 | Pages 272-281
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE00-A2158
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Using an importance function describing the capability of a system for producing fission neutrons, a new definition of the subcriticality is proposed, which has the physical meaning of a multiplication factor in a real subcritical system with external sources. This multiplication factor ks, which expresses the number of fission neutrons produced by a fission neutron in a steady state, is different from the usual criticality factor or the effective multiplication factor keff, since the former is calculated from the inhomogeneous equation with external source, whereas the latter is calculated from the homogeneous criticality equation without external source.
