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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.
Ghanshyam Thakur, Raju Khanal, Bijoyendra Narayan
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 4 | May 2019 | Pages 324-329
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1579623
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this work, plasma is produced by arc discharge between two copper electrodes and is characterized by a movable single probe and a double Langmuir probe. The movable Langmuir single-probe technique has a reference point since it is biased with reference to one of the electrodes of the plasma-producing system. In some situations such as radio-frequency discharges, no reference point is available to bias the movable single probe. In the double-probe method, each probe is biased with respect to each other and allowed to move through the arc plasma. Depending on the magnitude of the biasing potential, charges are collected by the probes, and the probe current flowing to the circuit is calculated. After that, we obtain the electron temperature and plasma density of the arc plasma. By using the double-probe method, the value of the plasma density is more precise than with the single-probe method. Hence, the double-probe method is more appropriate than the single-probe method.