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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.A. Boniface, N.V. Gnanapragasam, D.K. Ryland, S. Suppiah, I. Castillo
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 2 | March 2015 | Pages 258-261
Proceedings of TRITIUM 2013 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-T5
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
There is a potential interest at CRL to detritiate moderately tritiated light water and to reclaim tritiated, downgraded heavy water. With only a few limitations, a single CECE process configuration can be designed to remove tritium from heavy water or light water and upgrade heavy water. Such a design would have some restrictions on the nature of the feed-stock and tritium product, but could produce essentially tritium-free light or heavy water that is chemically pure. The extracted tritium is produced as a small quantity of tritiated heavy water. The overall plant capacity is fixed by the total amount of electrolysis and volume of catalyst. In this proposal, with 60 kA of electrolysis a throughput of 15 kg·h−1 light water for detritiation, about 4 kg·h−1 of heavy water for detritiation and about 27 kg·h−1 of 98% heavy water for upgrading can be processed. Such a plant requires about 1,000 L of AECL isotope exchange catalyst. The general design features and details of this multi-purpose CECE process are described in this paper, based on some practical choices of design criteria. In addition, we outline the small differences that must be accommodated and some compromises that must be made to make the plant capable of such flexible operation.