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Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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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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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.
Ian Cook, Stephen D. Unwin
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 94 | Number 2 | October 1986 | Pages 107-119
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE86-A27446
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
As performed conventionally, nuclear probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) may be criticized as utilizing inscrutable and unjustifiably “precise” quantitative informed judgment or extrapolation from that judgment. To meet this criticism, controlling principles that govern the formulation of probability densities are proposed, given only the informed input that would be required for a simple bounding analysis. These principles are founded upon information theoretic ideas of maximum uncertainty and cover both cases in which there exists a stochastic model of the phenomenon of interest and cases in which these is no such model. In part, the principles are conventional, and such an approach is justified by appealing to certain analogies in accounting practice and judicial decision making. Examples are given. Appropriate employment of these principles is expected to facilitate substantial progress toward PRA scrutability and transparency.