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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.
B. K. Shukla
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 65 | Number 1 | January 2014 | Pages 145-153
Lecture | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-647
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The 82.6 GHz/200 kW and 42 GHz/500 kW electron cyclotron resonance heating (ECRH) systems will be used in Tokamak SST-1 to carry out preionization and start-up experiments at 3.0- and 1.5-T operation. The 82.6-GHz gyrotron system has been tested for continuous waves (1000-s duration) using a conventional high-voltage power supply and for pulsed operation (200 kW for 1 s) using a regulated high-voltage power supply. The 42-GHz ECRH system is a pulsed system (500 ms), which will be used to carry out preionization and start-up experiments at 1.5 T (fundamental harmonic) on SST-1 and at 0.75 T (second harmonic) on Tokamak Aditya. The circular corrugated waveguide-based transmission line system contains two waveguide switches: one to test the gyrotron on a dummy load or the tokamak and the second switch to launch the ECRH power, either in SST-1 or in Aditya. The 42-GHz system has been tested on a dummy load, and the gyrotron delivers 500-kW power at beam voltage ∼49 kV and beam current ∼18 A. The output of the gyrotron is Gaussian (TEM00 mode) with mode purity >99%. The system is commissioned on both tokamaks (SST-1 and Aditya) to launch power in any tokamak.