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Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Standards Program
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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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.
Nicholas Crowder, Joomyung Lee, Abhinav Gupta, Kevin Han, Saran Bodda, Christopher Ritter
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 1 | October 2022 | Pages S260-S277
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2055705
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Designing piping systems for nuclear power plants involves engineers from multiple disciplines (i.e., thermal hydraulics, mechanical engineering, and structural/seismic) and close coordination with the contractors who build the plant. Any design changes during construction need to be carefully communicated and managed with all stakeholders in order to assess risks associated with the design changes. To allow the quick assessment of building and piping design changes through a streamlined building-piping coupled analysis, this paper presents a novel interoperability solution that converts bidirectionally between building information models (BIMs) and pipe stress models. Any design changes during construction that are shown in an as-built BIM are automatically converted into a pipe stress model. Any further design changes due to building-piping interaction analyses are converted back to the BIM for the contractor and other designers to access the latest model. Two case studies are presented to illustrate the bidirectional conversion that allows an integrated coupled analysis of the building-piping system to account for their interactions.