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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.
Tana Cardenas, Derek W. Schmidt, Eric N. Loomis, Randall B. Randolph, Christopher E. Hamilton, John Oertel, Brian M. Patterson, Kevin Henderson, Doug C. Wilson, Elizabeth Merritt, David Montgomery, William Daughton, Evan Dodd, Sasikumar Palaniyappan, John Kline, Steve Batha, Haibo Huang, Marty L. Hoppe, Michael Schoff, Neal Rice, Abbas Nikroo, Morris Wang, Richard Seugling, Donald Bennett, Steve Johnson, Carlos Castro
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 73 | Number 3 | April 2018 | Pages 344-353
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1406251
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The double-shell platform fielded at the National Ignition Facility requires developments in new machining techniques and robotic assembly stations to meet the experimental specifications. Current double-shell target designs use a dense high-Z inner shell, a foam cushion, and a low-Z outer shell. The design requires that the inner shell be gas filled using a fill tube. This tube impacts the entire machining and assembly design. Other intermediate physics designs have to be fielded to answer physics questions and advance the technology to be able to fabricate the full point design in the near future. One of these intermediate designs is a mid-Z imaging design. The methods of designing, fabricating, and characterizing each of the major components of an imaging double shell are discussed with an emphasis on the fabrication of the machined outer metal shell.