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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.
Yansong Liu, Taimin Yi, Kai Wang, Xiaobo Qi, Zhibing He
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 6 | August 2021 | Pages 454-462
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1927622
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In indirect-drive inertial confinement fusion, thin films on laser entrance hole (LEH) windows are needed to reflect thermal infrared radiation (IR) and to protect the deuterium-tritium (D-T) cryogenic shell. In this paper, a set of ultrathin aluminum films deposited on freestanding polyimide as LEH windows were studied on optical properties in the IR band. The influences of thickness and gas pressure on the IR transmittivity of these films were examined. It was found that gas pressure plays an important role in the IR transmission and microstructure changes of LEH films because of elastic modulus mismatch between aluminum and polymide. It is undoubted that the aluminum/polymide film can block thermal IR and protect the D-T cryogenic shell when gas pressure is less than 20 KPa.