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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.
V. P. Budaev, S. D. Fedorovich, A. V. Dedov, A. V. Karpov, Yu. V. Martynenko, D. I. Kavyrshin, M. K. Gubkin, M. V. Lukashevsky, A. V. Lazukin, A. V. Zakharenkov, A. P. Sliva, A. Yu. Marchenkov, M. V. Budaeva, Q. V. Tran, K. A. Rogozin, A. A. Konkov, G. B. Vasilyev, D. A. Burmistrov, S. V. Belousov
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 4 | May 2023 | Pages 407-412
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2118471
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The erosion of nanostructured tungsten and titanium by high-heat plasma flux, laser, and arcing is investigated. To fabricate nanostructural fuzz layers and hierarchical granularity on the surfaces, samples were exposed to helium plasma in the steady-state plasma device PLM-M, which is a linear plasma trap of an eight-pole multicusp magnetic field with parameters similar to the scrape-off layer and divertor plasma in a tokamak. Arcing ignited with a Nd:YAG laser pulse on the target fuzzy surface in the helium plasma resulted in the melting of fibers and the creation of craters of several microns in depth and several tens of microns in diameter.