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2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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Latest News
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.
H. L. Wilkens, J. Gunther, M. P. Mauldin, A. Nikroo, J. R. Wall, D. R. Wall, R. J. Wallace
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 4 | May 2006 | Pages 846-850
Technical Paper | Target Fabrication | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1212
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The process of making multi-layered depleted uranium (DU) and gold "cocktail" hohlraums is being developed in a sputter-coater designed and assembled at General Atomics. These elements have been chosen to increase the hohlraum wall albedo, targeting the composition that results in the highest hohlraum efficiency. Rather than co-sputtering the cocktail constituents as was done previously, the approach taken in this work is to sputter alternating multiple thin layers of DU and gold. The intended outcome of creating a multi-layered structure is to encapsulate the DU in gold, thus reducing or perhaps preventing rapid oxidation of uranium, a known problem in the co-sputtered materials. Residual stress in coatings has been reduced to sufficiently low levels by optimizing deposition pressure allowing fabrication of free-standing cylinders and foils. Characterization of this type of sandwich material is difficult due to the fact that the cocktail region consists of buried interfaces, though promising results from Auger depth profiling show that the materials have sufficiently low oxygen content (4 at. %) as well as the targeted composition.