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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.
Dingqing Guo, Chao Chen, Zhen Wang, Jian Lin, Bing Zhang, Daochuan Ge, Zhibin Chen
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 78 | Number 2 | February 2022 | Pages 103-110
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1960089
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The fusion reactor fueled by deuterium and tritium will generate many neutron activation products, causing occupational exposure and radiation risk. The minimization of occupational radiation exposure (ORE) is one of the safety goals for fusion reactors. However, detailed designs and management schemes are still lacking for fusion reactors, and the ORE evaluations are still well simplified. In this paper, an integrated assessment approach is proposed for fusion reactors at the conceptual or detailed design stage. The core idea is to estimate the ORE by referring to the dose rates and work efforts of mature fission reactors and ITER and modifying the data of these similar systems by a proportional coefficient according to the differences of component scale, operating environment, etc. The results showed that water cooling fusion reactors will generate the highest collective dose of 2635 p-mSv/year, while the PbLi cooling ones come next with about 1684 p-mSv/year and the helium cooling ones are the least. This method will contribute to fusion reactor design, operation, and maintenance optimization at the earlier stages and provide guidance to reduce the overall potential ORE to workers.