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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.
F. Winterberg
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 2 | February 2020 | Pages 141-144
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1704573
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Taking into account Einstein’s general theory of relativity, a modification of Lockheed’s compact fusion reactor concept is proposed by replacing the two superconducting tori with rapidly rotating tori rotating in opposite directions. According to the general theory of relativity, two Coriolis force fields in opposite directions are set up, both of them having a negative mass density in their corotating reference systems, with a vanishing negative mass density in the center in between the rotating tori, where the hot fusion plasma is centered. Because of the Nernst effect going in the opposite direction, large toroidal currents are set up, repelling the hot plasma from the much cooler tori. This results in closed magnetic field lines for stable plasma confinement. The remaining problem, the removal of the heat released by neutron absorption in the metallic tori, can be resolved by a pulsed operation, axially injecting cool deuterium-tritium gas, from which the heat is externally removed by a radiator.