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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.
Shiping Wei, Xinyu Sun, Haixia Wang, Jiangtao Jia, Zhibin Chen, Shichao Zhang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 7 | October 2020 | Pages 869-877
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1777668
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) tritium plant has to deal with a larger amount of tritium than ITER. The tritium source term is one of the key issues for safety assessment and operation of the CFETR. In this technical note, the preliminary estimation and safety analysis of the tritium source term for the CFETR tritium plant in normal operation have been performed on compliance with the ongoing plant design. The estimation method adopted is the system dynamics simulation performed by the Tritium Analysis program for fusion System developed by the Frontier Development of Science (FDS) team. The preliminary analysis results show that the storage and delivery system still stores the most amount of tritium. Until after 1 month of operation the plasma-facing material needs to be cleaned in the CFETR corresponding to the 600-g limit. Tritium losses, such as tritium permeation into the coolant and release to building rooms, are of a much smaller amount than tritium decay in the 2-week operation. It is worth noting that the tritium concentration somewhere in the tritium plant can be slightly more than 1 DAC (derived air concentration). These preliminary analysis results could provide some valuable references for the safety design and tritium management of the CFETR tritium plant.