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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.
Sophie Blondel, Karl D. Hammond, Lin Hu, Dimitrios Maroudas, Brian D. Wirth
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 1 | January 2017 | Pages 22-35
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST16-112
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We provide a description of the dependence on surface crystallographic orientation and temperature of the segregation of helium implanted with energies consistent with low-energy plasma exposure to tungsten surfaces. Here, we describe multiscale modeling results based on a hierarchical approach to scale bridging that incorporates atomistic studies based on a reliable interatomic potential to parameterize a spatially dependent drift-diffusion-reaction cluster-dynamics code. An extensive set of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations has been performed at 933 K and/or 1200 K to determine the probabilities of desorption and modified trap mutation that occurs as small, mobile Hen (1 ≤ n ≤ 7) clusters diffuse from the near-surface region toward surfaces of varying crystallographic orientation due to an elastic interaction force that provides the thermodynamic driving force for surface segregation. These near-surface cluster dynamics have significant effects on the surface morphology, the near-surface defect structures, and the amount of helium retained in the material upon plasma exposure, for which we have developed an extensive MD database of cumulative evolution during high-flux helium implantation at 933 K, which we compare to our properly parameterized cluster-dynamics model. This validated model is then used to evaluate the effects of temperature on helium retention and subsurface helium clustering.