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Latest News
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.
B. Li, Z. W. Xia, Y. D. Pan, T. Z. Fang, B. Zhang, S. Liu, W. Li, Y. Yang, G. Kiss, S. Maruyama, U. Kruezi, X. G. Liu, F. Villers, X. M. Huang, M. Conroy, F. He
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 3 | April 2021 | Pages 228-234
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1874764
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
As an important part of the ITER gas injection system, the fusion power shutdown system delivers large quantities of gas into the vacuum vessel to stop the fusion power in an emergency case. Two identical but independent units are designed for mutual redundancy. Each unit includes an injection pipeline and a unit that contains a gas reservoir, solenoid valve, pneumatic isolation valve, and pressure switches. Among these components, the working gas reservoir parameters are investigated by experiments based on the required total gas quantity of at least 3000 Pa m3 neon or mixtures of neon and hydrogen injected within 3 s. The working gas is released utilizing a pneumatically actuated valve that is not affected by the strong stray magnetic field of about 0.205 T. The associated solenoid valve is equipped with magnetic shielding that is designed by a magnetostatic analysis. These components lie on the same plane in the unit to maximize the maintainability. Furthermore, the structure integrity of the unit and its support frame is validated by a preliminary structural analysis.