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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.
Jin-Yang Li, Sheng-Miao Guo, Long Gu, You-Peng Zhang, Hu-Shan Xu, Da-Wei Wang, Rui Yu, Guan Wang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 6 | August 2021 | Pages 409-418
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1921363
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The stellarator plasma device has been widely studied as one of the candidate solutions paralleling the ITER project, and its coupling with a fission blanket can bring benefits promoting the development of fusion technology with stable energy production simultaneously. However, the neutronics optimization design for the stellarator-type Fusion-Fission Hybrid Reactor (FFHR) is extremely complex since the helical structure with a large amount of spline curved surfaces cannot be exactly described in most of the Monte Carlo simulation processes, and the preliminary design stage has also been a time-consuming and error-prone task with the requirements frequently changing. In this context, the mesh-oriented optimized method has been considered for the parametric modeling analysis in order to get the ideal structure without redundant topologic information, and the corresponding conversion process from computer-aided design (CAD) to Monte Carlo simulation has been fulfilled by the CAD-PSFO code. Moreover, the liquid type of thorium-uranium fuels has been selected as the solutes dissolve in the molten salt blanket with its multilayer structure, where the burnup feature and neutronics properties have been analyzed and explained with the help of the OMCB code. The stellarator-type FFHR has been designed as a compact multifunctional device that can incinerate plutonium and transmute the minor actinide isotopes with tritium self-sufficiency and the high-energy multiplication factor.