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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.
J. E. Klein, K. L. Shanahan, P. J. Foster, R. A. Baker
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 2 | March 2015 | Pages 424-427
Proceedings of TRITIUM 2013 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-T45
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A nominal 1500 STP-L Passively Cooled, Electrically heated hydride (PACE) Bed was developed and deployed into tritium service in Savannah River Site (SRS) Tritium Facilities. Process beds to be used for low concentration tritium gas were not fitted with instrumentation to perform the steady-state, flowing gas calorimetric inventory measurement method: In-Bed Accountability (IBA). In some instances, two physical beds, or canisters, were joined together with one process line connection, creating a bed with a total capacity of nominally 3000 STP-L or up to 815 grams of tritium. The IBA detection limit for these beds was estimated to be 9.75 grams tritium. After deployment of these low tritium beds, the need arose to estimate tritium inventories of these beds without installation of IBA instrumentation. Two methods have been developed to estimate the tritium inventory of these low tritium content beds. The first approach assumes the bed is half-full and uses a gas composition measurement to estimate the tritium inventory and uncertainty. The second approach utilizes the bed’s hydride material pressure-composition-temperature (PCT) properties and a gas composition measurement to reduce the uncertainty in the calculated bed inventory.