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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.
Igor Kupriyanov, Nikolay Porezanov, George Nikolaev, Liudmila Kurbatova, Vyacheslav Podkovyrov, Anatoly Muzichenko, Anatoly Zhitlukhin, Yury Gasparyan, Alexander Gervash
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 66 | Number 1 | July-August 2014 | Pages 171-179
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-749
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Beryllium will be used as a plasma-facing material for the ITER first wall. It is expected that erosion of beryllium under transient plasma loads such as the edge-localized modes (ELMs) and disruptions will determine the lifetime of the ITER first wall. The results of recent experiments with the Russian beryllium of TGP-56FW ITER grade on the QSPA-Be plasma gun facility are presented. The Be/CuCrZr mock-ups were tested by deuterium plasma and radiative streams both with pulse duration of 0.5 ms and heat loads of 0.5 and 0.4 MJ/m2, correspondingly. Experiments were performed at 250 °C. The beryllium mock-ups were exposed to up to 100 shots. After 10, 40 and 100 shots, the evolution of surface microstructure and crack morphology were investigated as well as beryllium mass loss under the erosion process. The deuterium retention in erosion products was also studied by the thermal desorption method.