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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.
Emily Clark, Arnold Lumsdaine, Jean Boscary, Kivanc Ekici, Jeffrey Harris, Dean McGinnis, Jeremy D. Lore, Alan Peacock, Jörg Tretter
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 3 | October 2015 | Pages 635-639
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-954
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Wendelstein 7-X stellarator experiment is scheduled to start operation in mid- 2015, and to move to steady-state operation in 2019. During this steady-state operation, certain plasma scenarios have been shown to produce heat fluxes that exceed the technological limits on the edges of the divertor target elements. The addition of a so-called scraper element (SE) in the ten divertor locations is being investigated in order to reduce the heat load on these divertor target edges. The ANSYS commercial multiphysics package is used to model the performance of the SE under predicted operational conditions. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling is performed to analyze the hydraulic and thermal characteristics of the water-cooled SE under thermal loading using the ANSYS CFX software. This multiphysics modeling is performed for the entire SE to ensure that the total pressure drop in the cooling water circuits, the increase in water temperature, and the peak temperature in the CFC all satisfy the design requirements. Because the contour of the SE surface must be machined to a sub-millimeter precision, it is important to determine the amount of thermal expansion experienced by the entire SE. The thermal-hydraulic results are imported into ANSYS Mechanical to perform the thermal-structural analysis. The thermal deformation of the SE is examined to confirm that the component’s position will remain within its operational limits.