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Antares achieves zero-power criticality at INL
Leveraging more than $140 million in private capital fundraising, over 322,000 square feet of operational manufacturing space, and multifaceted partnerships with the Departments of Energy and Defense, reactor start-up Antares has become the first company involved in the Reactor Pilot Program to achieve zero-power fueled criticality—a full month ahead of the July 4 deadline set by President Trump’s Executive Order 14301.
This milestone, announced yesterday, was achieved with the company’s Mark-0: a sodium heat-pipe-cooled, TRISO-fueled microreactor. The Mark-0 is a forerunner to the company’s flagship design, which it calls the R1. For Antares, this development represents a key validation of its reactor physics, control systems, and supply chain.
H. Xu, K. P. Youngblood, H. Huang, J. J. Wu, K. A. Moreno, A. Nikroo, S. J. Shin, Y. M. Wang, A. V. Hamza
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 2 | March-April 2013 | Pages 202-207
Technical Paper | Selected papers from 20th Target Fabrication Meeting, May 20-24, 2012, Santa Fe, NM, Guest Editor: Robert C. Cook | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-TFM20-16
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The point design of beryllium capsules includes three Cu-doped layers in a 160-m-thick beryllium shell to achieve the desired X-ray absorption profile. The beryllium capsules were deposited on glow discharge polymer mandrels using a magnetron sputtering process. Cu diffusion during pyrolysis to remove the mandrels after coating has caused nonuniform distribution of Cu along the azimuthal direction due to inhomogeneous diffusion. This nonuniformity along the azimuthal direction could lead to Rayleigh-Taylor instability during capsule implosion. One of the methods to solve this issue is to incorporate a beryllium oxide diffusion barrier layer at the beryllium-Cu-doped-beryllium layer interfaces. In situ and ex situ beryllium oxide layers have proved to be effective in stopping Cu diffusion. This paper will focus on the approaches we have developed to characterize the in situ and ex situ oxide barrier layer thickness by using a combination of Auger electron spectroscopy profiles and Rutherford backscattering spectrometry measurements.