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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.
E. M. Giraldez, P. B. Mirkarimi, J. A. Emig, K. B. Fournier, H. Huang, J. S. Jaquez, E. C. Losbanos, M. J. May, J. D. Sain, M. E. Schoff, N. E. Teslich, M. T. Vu, R. J. Wallace
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 2 | March-April 2013 | Pages 242-246
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-TFM20-28
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Energy partitioning, energy coupling (EPEC) is one of the new experimental platforms being investigated at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) to provide valuable data for national security applications. The EPEC target is a 7-m-thick silver spherical halfraum driven by a single NIF quad. This paper will describe the fabrication of the hollow spherical target, starting with the selection of the mandrel, the single-point diamond turning process used to achieve the desired thickness, and the final processing to remove the mandrel. Also discussed will be the metrology technique, X-ray opacity, used to determine the wall thickness and wall uniformity and how this nondestructive technique was benchmarked by two destructive characterization techniques, dual focused ion beam and scanning electron microscope, for wall thickness determination.