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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.
Dong Won Lee, Hyung Gon Jin, Eo Hwak Lee, Jae Sung Yoon, Suk Kwon Kim, Seungyon Cho, Hyun Gon Lee
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 3 | October 2015 | Pages 680-683
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-979
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A hypervapotron mockup was fabricated and used in the Neutral Beam Injection (NBI) heating system at KAERI. During the test, especially with the JAEA ion source, which has a focused beam and a long pulse, some failures in the mockup were experienced. Using the existing correlation for a critical heat flux (CHF), the incident CHF was assessed, in which the modified Tong-75 CHF correlation for the one-sided heat flux was used. In addition, using the conventional CFD and FEM codes such as ANASYS-CFX and ANYS-mechanical, the thermal lifetimes were evaluated according to the beam operation and water cooling conditions. The evaluated ICHF is 28.6 MW/m2 and is much higher than the loaded peak heat of about 8.7 MW/m2 at a 2.3 MW heat load. The cause of failure seems not to be the CHF considering the existing correlations. The thermal lifetimes were evaluated to be about 100 cycles and 11 cycles for 1.56 MW and 2.3 MW heat load conditions, respectively. When the dump heat is reached in the mockup frequently, it can fail in the corner of the inlet region below 11 cycles when a 2.3 MW heat is loaded.