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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.
Jennifer Lyons, Edward Love, Kim Burns
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 4 | May 2017 | Pages 616-621
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1290944
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
TEACUP (Tritium Effluent Analysis and Core-follow, Up-to-date and Predictive) is a tritium management and supplemental core follow program that allows its users to account for reactor coolant system (RCS) tritium sources, generate discharge release estimates, account for downstream river flows and concentrations, and calculate corresponding uncertainties. The program incorporates water balance methodologies, tritium production estimates from secondary startup neutron sources, soluble boron content, reactor coolant system tritium measurements, and seasonal river flow estimates. TEACUP was designed specifically to facilitate the tracking of Tritium Producing Burnable Absorber Rod (TPBAR) permeation since measuring in-reactor permeation directly is not feasible and prediction methodologies have thus far been insufficient. A number of models, calculations, and correlations were developed in order to quantify all of the leading sources and losses of tritium in the RCS. By comparing all of the known contributors and discharges from the RCS tritium inventory to the measured RCS tritium concentration, the unaccounted for balance (within some band of uncertainty) can be attributed to TPBAR permeation. The tritium release estimates to the river generated from TEACUP are validated by comparing them to the measured tritium releases which match well and give confidence that TEACUP is tracking and accounting for tritium appropriately. An additional check on the methodologies within TEACUP is that the cycle-to-cycle trends for tritium permeation per TPBAR are consistent in behavior and the estimated release per TPBAR across each cycle is the same within their uncertainty.