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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.
D. van Houtte
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 8 | November 2019 | Pages 1064-1075
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1658042
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The systems engineering process starts with the discovery of the real issues that need to be resolved and the identification of failures that are the most probable or/and have the highest negative impact during the life cycle of a project. Systems engineering involves finding mitigations to these most critical problems. This logic is fully followed in reliability, availability, maintainability, inspectability (RAMI) engineering. Although this area is at its beginning in fusion technologies, a few years ago the ITER Organization developed an approach to assess the RAMI requirement of systems. As an example of what a RAMI analysis can bring to the maintainability and thus operational availability of a nuclear fusion facility like ITER, the availability of the cask and plug remote handling system in charge of handling of port plugs and their moving between the port cells to the hot cell facility is addressed in the case of diagnostic equatorial port plugs.