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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.
E. Mazzucato
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 7 | October 2020 | Pages 807-813
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1795972
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The paper describes a fusion reactor scheme consisting of two 200-m-long magnetic mirrors with a ratio of two connected by semicircular sections to form a racetrack configuration. The two most serious problems of magnetic mirrors, magnetohydrodynamic stability and end losses, are solved by minimizing the negative curvature of the mirror magnetic field lines and using helical windings in the curved sections to add a positive curvature and strong shear to the magnetic field lines at and beyond the mirror throat and for confining the mirror end losses. The reactor should be capable of producing at least 13 GW of fusion power when operating in deuterium-tritium at the same plasma density and temperature as ITER.