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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.
Zhengyu Huang, Robert M. Edwards
Nuclear Technology | Volume 143 | Number 2 | August 2003 | Pages 132-143
Technical Paper | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technologies | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3403
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Hybrid reactor simulation (HRS) of boiling water reactor (BWR) instabilities, including in-phase and out-of-phase (OOP) oscillations, has been implemented on The Pennsylvania State University TRIGA reactor. The TRIGA reactor's power response is used to simulate reactor neutron dynamics for in-phase oscillation or the fundamental mode of the reactor modal kinetics for OOP oscillations. The reactor power signal drives a real-time boiling channel simulation, and the calculated reactivity feedback is in turn fed into the TRIGA reactor via an experimental changeable reactivity device. The thermal-hydraulic dynamics, together with first harmonic mode power dynamics, is digitally simulated in the real-time environment. The real-time digital simulation of boiling channel thermal hydraulics is performed by solving constitutive equations for different regions in the channel and is realized by a high-performance personal computer. The nonlinearity of the thermal-hydraulic model ensures the capability to simulate the oscillation phenomena, limit cycle and OOP oscillation, in BWR nuclear power plants. By adjusting reactivity feedback gains for both modes, various oscillation combinations can be realized in the experiment. The dynamics of axially lumped power distribution over the core is displayed in three-dimensional graphs. The HRS reactor power response mimics the BWR core-wide power stability phenomena. In the OOP oscillation HRS, the combination of reactor response and the simulated first harmonic power using shaping functions mimics BWR regional power oscillations. With this HRS testbed, a monitoring and/or control system designed for BWR power oscillations can be experimentally tested and verified.