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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.
Misaki Sato, Hiromichi Uchimura, Kensuke Toda, Tomonori Tokunaga, Hideo Watanabe, Naoaki Yoshida, Yuji Hatano, Ryuta Kasada, Takuya Nagasaka, Akihiko Kimura, Yasuhisa Oya, Kenji Okuno
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 3 | April 2015 | Pages 551-554
Proceedings of TRITIUM 2013 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-T77
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The deuterium retention behavior for the Vacuum Plasma Spraying (VPS) tungsten (W) coating was studied to demonstrate the tritium retention as a function of heating temperature. It was found that two major deuterium desorption stages were observed at the temperature regions of 400 - 700 K (Stage 1) and 900 - 1100 K (Stage 2), considering that Stage 1 was linked to the desorption of deuterium trapped by near surface and intrinsic defects, and Stage 2 was related to the desorption of deuterium bound to impurities as C-D bonds. By heating the sample above 673 K, the major peak of C-1s was shifted from C-O bond to C-C bond, where the retention of deuterium as Stage 2 was increased. Therefore it was indicating that the hydrogen isotope retention was controlled by the amount of C-C bond in VPS, most of which was contaminated during the VPS coating process. The comparison of several samples (VPS-W with shading, VPS-W without shading and Polycrystalline W (PCW)) shows that the carbon impurity has a large affinity with deuterium and make stable trapping states compared to that with intrinsic defects and grain boundaries. However, most of them was reduced by heating at 1173 K. Therefore, heating treatment is quite important to get rid of carbon impurities and refrain higher tritium retention in VPS.