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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.
Parthasarathi Das, Rita Paikaray, Subrata Samantaray, Bipin Kumar Sethy, Amulya Kumar Sanyasi, Joydeep Ghosh
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 78 | Number 1 | January 2022 | Pages 56-65
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1938906
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The pulsed washer gun–generated plasma released into an evacuated chamber has been diagnosed using the spectroscopic technique. By analyzing the recorded spectral lines of argon plasma, the electron temperature is determined using the spectral line ratios of the Ar ion and Ar atom following the Corona model. The light is collected using an optical fiber placed at a glass port of the chamber and fed into a digital spectrometer to obtain the emitted spectra from plasma in front of the plasma gun mouth. As the plasma diffuses after ejecting out into the evacuated chamber from the plasma gun, the Corona model is an appropriate model for the electron temperature estimation. Large differences in estimated electron temperatures are observed when the Boltzmann plot method, assuming the local thermal equilibrium model for the atomic and ionic lines separately, is used. To study the effect of base pressure in the evacuated chamber on the electron temperature of the plasma ejecting out of the gun, the electron temperature with different base pressures ranging from 20 to 100 Pa is measured and analyzed.