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Latest News
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.
G. L. Kulcinski, J. F. Santarius, G. A. Emmert, R. L. Bonomo, G. E. Becerra, A. N. Fancher, L. M. Garrison, K. B. Hall, M. J. Jasica, A. M. McEvoy, M. X. Navarro, M. K. Michalak, C. M. Schuff
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 2 | September 2015 | Pages 314-318
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-934
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For nearly two decades, as many as 4 Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (IEC) devices have been operated simultaneously at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Over that time period we have learned that the early perceptions of how IEC devices operate are quite different from the actual performance in the Laboratory. Over the past 2 years we have gained even more understanding of IEC physics and technology. Experimental measurements and theoretical improvements have better characterized both the negative ions that contribute up to ~10% of the fusion rate in some cases and the neutral energy distributions in IEC devices at moderate pressure (0.07-0.7 Pa ≈ 0.5-5 mTorr). We also now understand more of why operation with helium plasmas has such a detrimental effect on high voltage performance of the traditional tungsten alloy grid wires. Most of the previous IEC work had been confined to < 100 kV with short operation times up to 150 kV. We have recently expanded our operating regime to ≈ 200 kV anode-cathode potential difference, which is, to our knowledge, the highest-voltage IEC operation reported in the worldwide IEC literature. Several design modifications were required to achieve steady state operation at these high voltages and some are described in this article.