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Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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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.
Francisco J. Souto, Robert H. Kimpland, A. Sharif Heger
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 150 | Number 3 | July 2005 | Pages 322-335
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE05-A2519
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the primary methods to produce medical isotopes, such as 99Mo, is by irradiation of uranium targets in heterogeneous reactors. Solution reactors present a potential alternative to produce medical isotopes. The Medical Isotope Production Reactor (MIPR) concept has been proposed to produce medical isotopes with lower uranium consumption and waste than those in heterogeneous reactors. Commercial production of medical isotopes in solution reactors requires steady-state operation at ~200 kW. At this power regime, fuel-solution temperature increase and radiolytic-gas bubble formation introduce a negative reactivity feedback that has to be mitigated. A model based on the point reactor kinetic equations has been developed to investigate these reactivity effects. This model has been validated against experimental results from the Los Alamos National Laboratory uranyl fluoride Solution High-Energy Burst Assembly (SHEBA) and shows the feasibility of solution reactors for the commercial production of medical isotopes.