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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.
Rodrigo Antunes, Laëtitia Frances, Marco Incelli, Alessia Santucci
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 3 | April 2020 | Pages 257-261
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1705748
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the reference technologies for the fuel cycle of fusion machines is Pd/Ag membranes. This technology is proposed to be implemented in tritium recovery systems because of their exclusive selectivity toward molecular hydrogen isotopes (Q = H, D, T). To perform scaling-up studies for the Tritium Extraction and Removal System of the European DEMOnstration fusion power reactor (DEMO) with a solid blanket, a one-dimensional simulation code was recently developed and successfully validated with experiments. This code relies on different operational (e.g., feed pressure and temperature), geometrical (e.g., permeator length), and membrane-intrinsic (e.g., Q2 permeability) parameters given as input. The main outcome is the Q2 permeation efficiency, defined as the Q2 permeate–to–feed flow ratio. Because of the low concentrations of Q2 expected at the He stream purging the solid blanket, the surface effects are expected to be important, decreasing the separation efficiency of the Pd/Ag permeators. In this paper the role of surface effects on the permeation efficiency is studied for a DEMO-relevant scenario (feeding mixture: HT/H2/He). Moreover, a sensitivity study is also given demonstrating the high impact of the permeation area, temperature, and feed pressure on the permeation efficiency of HT.