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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.
Rohan Biwalkar, Sola Talabi (Pittsburgh Technical)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 985-988
An Integrated Small Modular Reactor is an Integral Pressurized-Water Reactor (iPWR) with a relatively high surface-area-to-volume ratio. It has been hypothesized that a higher surface-area-to-volume ratio aids passive aerosol decontamination through various deposition phenomena, namely thermophoresis, diffusiophoresis and gravitational settling. Accordingly, particle deposition was studied within a range of thermal-hydraulic parameters, namely pressure, temperature and A/V ratios, in the presence as well as the absence of steam. It was found that an overall convective flow exists inside the Containment Vessel (CV) volume, originating due to fluid buoyancy and the temperature gradient between the Reactor Vessel (RV) and Containment Vessel walls. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations confirmed the existence of this convective flow, and it has experimentally been identified as a major particle transport mechanism. The convective flow also aids particle deposition due to turbulent inertial impaction on the walls. The flow velocities are at least an order of magnitude higher than the deposition velocities by phoretic phenomena; this significantly enhances the importance of the convective flow in contributing to particle transport during post-accident conditions in iPWRs.