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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.
Seonghee Hong, Myunghyun Kim
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 6 | August 2019 | Pages 466-478
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1609820
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To enhance the practical application of a fusion-driven subcritical reactor, a system with constant fusion power by online feeding of molten salt fuel was designed. The system satisfies multiple purposes including waste transmutation, tritium breeding (TB), and energy multiplication (EM) through constant fusion power. All neutronic calculations were performed by SERPENT2.1.29 with the ENDF/B-VII.0 neutron cross-section library in order to simulate the online-feeding process.
A constant k-eff is maintained by the amount of the feeding being larger than the amount of the removed fission products. However, system performance is significantly improved by just reducting the reactivity swing with the feeding. Compared to a once-through cycle (OTC), the performance of TB and EM is significantly improved as the feeding rate increases. However, there is no deep burning effect like the OTC for waste transmutation.
The performance of waste transmutation is changed in the feeding scenarios. For the scenario with a high plutonium ratio, transmutation with plutonium is increased. On the other hand, for the feeding scenario with a high minor actinide ratio, transuranic waste is burned. However, the transmutation performance is degraded due to a low fission-to-capture ratio.