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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.
Nemanja Aranđelović, Dušan Nikezić, Dragan Brajović, Uzahir Ramadani
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 78 | Number 5 | July 2022 | Pages 369-378
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2031690
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recently, the idea of injecting energy with electromagnetic radiation in order to heat the plasma to achieve controlled fusion has been abandoned. This initially favored mechanism was rejected because it has been shown that after a certain temperature the plasma glows and acts as a mirror that reflects electromagnetic radiation. For that reason, today the energy is injected into the plasma by electrons. For this purpose, pulses from several electron beam generators, based on a Marx generator, are synchronously fired into the plasma. In addition to economic problems, the biggest problem of this method is the appearance of jitter, i.e., pulses with a width of about 5 ns are not simply added up but propagated in time due to the impossibility of synchronizing simultaneous triggering of the multiple electronic generators. In order to avoid this, the possibility of monitoring the pulses from an individual electron beam generator for the purpose of online synchronization is investigated in this paper. The voltage pulse monitoring of the electron beam generator was measured by instruments with the fastest response—the electro-optical Kerr effect and a fast capacitive probe. The obtained results showed that the electro-optical Kerr response is somewhat faster but much more complicated, so the use of fast capacitive probes is recommended for practice.