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Conference Spotlight
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.
Bruno Merk (Univ of Liverpool), Dennis Allen (Amec Foster Wheeler), Mark Bankhead (NNL), Andy Bowen (Amec Foster Wheeler), Dave Bowman (Univ of Liverpool), Siman de Haas (Rolls-Royce Nuclear), Jefri Draup (EDF Energy), Lynn Dwyer (Univ of Liverpool), Matt Eaton (Imperial College London), Erwan Galenne (EDF-Energy), Chris Jackson (Rolls-Royce Nuclear), Chi Kin Lai, Andrew Levers (Univ of Liverpool), Ben Lindley (Amec Foster Wheeler), Dzianis Litskevich (Univ of Liverpool), Luke Mason (STFC), Geoff Parks (Univ of Cambridge), Edoardo Patelli, Eann Patterson (Univ of Liverpool), Aiden Peakman (NNL), Eugene Shwageraus (Univ of Cambridge), Andy Smethurst, Paul Smith (Amec Foster Wheeler), Adrian Toland (STFC), Konstantin Vikhorev (Univ of Liverpool)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 1085-1090
The UK Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has recently launched a national R&D programme with a work package on Digital Reactor Design. It consists of development of a Nuclear Virtual Engineering Capability within an integrated Modelling and Simulation Programme. A key challenge of nuclear reactor modelling and simulation is system complexity, which arises from a wide range of important multi-physics phenomena appearing across multiple length scales requiring a multi scale and multi methodological approach. In a final stage an integrated nuclear digital environment (INDE) is envisaged providing a link between modelling and simulation data and real world data across the whole nuclear lifecycle. For the demonstration of the capabilities ‘Challenge problems/Use cases’ will be defined to target future capability developments on the path to the future integrated nuclear digital environment (INDE). PWR and AGR simulation cases have already been specified. The AGR case considers the through-life structural performance of graphite bricks in a stepwise multi-scale, multi-physics approach to support reactor operations and lifetime extension. The PWR case is based on core multi-physics modelling of a control rod ejection accident. Additional use cases to demonstrate the advanced visualization tools of the virtual engineering centre are currently under development.