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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.
I. P. Serrano, J. I. Linares, A. Cantizano, B. Y. Moratilla
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 3 | September 2013 | Pages 483-487
DEMO and Next-Step Facilities | Proceedings of the Twentieth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE-2012) (Part 2) Nashville, Tennessee, August 27-31, 2012 | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A19139
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A domestic research program called TECNO_FUS was launched in Spain in 2009 to support technological developments related to a dual-coolant (He/Pb-Li) breeding blanket design concept. One of the goals of the project was the analysis of a suitable power conversion system with an enhanced coupling with the reactor heat sources. Each source has a different thermal level which generates many problems in the coupling.In previous works the authors have explored enhanced power cycles, taken from literature, which solve the differences in the thermal levels of the sources with combined or dual cycles. Although these cycles reach high efficiencies (between 45% and 47%) their layout is very complex and the use of steam is required.In this paper a new power conversion cycle is proposed. It avoids the use of complex layouts, being a variant of the supercritical CO2 Brayton cycle matched to the available thermal sources through an extra recuperator. The basic supercritical CO2 Brayton cycle has been also analyzed for comparison. The new cycle has been optimized so that efficiencies above 47% have been achieved.