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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.
Joharimanitra Randrianandraina, Manuel Grivet, Christophe Ramseyer, Jean-Emmanuel Groetz, Bruno Cardey, Freddy Torrealba Anzola, Didier Ducret, Caroline Chambelland
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 1 | January 2021 | Pages 19-25
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1842680
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work is motivated by the results obtained during a study on the tritiated water adsorbed in zeolite [L. Frances et al., J. Phys. Chem. C, 119, 28462 (2015)]. The decomposition of water by radiolysis leads to the production of dioxygen and dihydrogen as main stable products. By studying the evolution of their quantities of matter, one can note an increase in a first stage, followed by a decrease after a few hundred days of storage until complete disappearance. This interesting process depends on the water loading ratios, expressed in mass percentage, lying between 4%, and 19%; such a phenomenon is not observed in saturated zeolite. Our goal is to determine, through numerical simulations, how this disappearance, which is associated with the recombination of the radiolysis products, occurs by making a microscopic study on the adsorption of H2O, H2, and O2 molecules on 4A zeolite (Z4A). Computational physics is useful to understand the effects of molecule adsorption on its structure and also to closely examine the molecule-zeolite and molecule-molecule interactions. Indeed, different simulation methods are used from static to dynamic studies employing both quantum and classical tools with the periodical structure of Z4A. To summarize, the adsorption of molecules from the radiolysis of water are studied according to different points of view (quantum and classical) using various numerical simulation tools, such as density functional theory for ab initio structural optimization and energy calculation, Monte Carlo to study the distribution of the adsorbed molecules in the zeolite, and molecular dynamics to follow the evolution of the system (molecule + zeolite) over time depending on the temperature, in order to extract as much information as possible (structurally, statistically, energy, electronically) to understand the main problematic of this work: How do stable molecules issued from radiolysis recombine in Z4A?