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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.
Y. C. Francis Thio, Scott C. Hsu, F. Douglas Witherspoon, Edward Cruz, Andrew Case, Samuel Langendorf, Kevin Yates, John Dunn, Jason Cassibry, Roman Samulyak, Peter Stoltz, Samuel J. Brockington, Ajoke Williams, Marco Luna, Robert Becker, Adam Cook
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 7 | October 2019 | Pages 581-598
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1598736
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Plasma-jet-driven magneto-inertial fusion (PJMIF) is the only embodiment of magneto-inertial fusion that has the unique combination of stand-off implosion and high implosion velocity (50 to 150 km/s). It uses inexpensive plasma guns for all plasma formation and implosion and has potential for a relatively high repetition rate from 1 to 2 Hz. Its configuration is compatible with the use of a thick liquid wall that doubles as a tritium breeding blanket as well as a coolant for extracting the heat out of the fusion reactor. The PJMIF operational parameter-space allows for the possibility of using a sufficiently dense target plasma for the target plasma to have a high . If such a high- plasma could be realized, it would help to suppress micro and magnetohydrodynamic instabilities, giving its target plasma classical transport and energy confinement characteristics. Its open geometry and moderate time and spatial scales provide convenient diagnostics access. Diagnostics accessibility, high shot rate, and low cost per shot should enable quick resolution of technical issues during development, thus the potential for enabling rapid research and development of PJMIF. There are a number of challenges for PJMIF, however, including being at a very early stage of development, developing the required plasma guns, dealing with potential liner nonuniformities, clearing the chamber of residual high-Z gas between shots, and developing the repetitive pulsed-power component technologies. Over the last 3 years, the development of the Plasma Liner Formation Experiment (PLX-) has been undertaken to explore the physics and demonstrate the formation of a spherical liner by the merging of a spherical array of plasma jets. Two- and three-jet merging experiments have been conducted to study the interactions of the jets. Six- and seven-jet experiments have been performed to form a piece of the plasma liner. A brief status report on this development is provided in this paper.