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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.
G. Brunton, A. Casey, M. Christensen, R. Demaret, M. Fedorov, M. Flegel, P. Folta, T. Frazier, M. Hutton, L. Kegelmeyer, L. Lagin, P. Ludwigsen, R. Reed, D. Speck, K. Wilhelmsen
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 69 | Number 1 | January-February 2016 | Pages 352-365
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-164
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Orchestration of every National Ignition Facility (NIF) shot cycle is managed by the Integrated Computer Control System (ICCS), which uses a scalable software architecture running code on more than 1950 front-end processors, embedded controllers, and supervisory servers. The ICCS operates laser and industrial control hardware containing 66 000 control and monitor points to ensure that all of NIF’s laser beams arrive at the target within 30 ps of each other and are aligned to a pointing accuracy of less than 50 μm root-mean-square, while ensuring that a host of diagnostic instruments record data in a few billionths of a second. NIF’s automated control subsystems are built from a common object-oriented software framework that distributes the software across the computer network and achieves interoperation between different software languages and target architectures. A large suite of business and scientific software tools supports experimental planning, experimental setup, facility configuration, and post-shot analysis. Standard business services using open-source software, commercial workflow tools, and database and messaging technologies have been developed. An information technology infrastructure consisting of servers, network devices, and storage provides the foundation for these systems. This paper is an overview of the control and information systems used to support a wide variety of experiments during the National Ignition Campaign.