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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.
Changle Liu, Lei Li, Yu Zhou, Peng Zhang, Jun Song, Songtao Wu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 5 | July 2023 | Pages 610-615
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2162795
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the goals of fusion blanket design is to explore the blanket material design to maintain the characteristics of the internal temperature field. This is because the characteristics of the temperature field have an important influence on the effectiveness of tritium release for the blanket. In this work, the influence of material design on temperature field characteristics is studied based on a multizone structure blanket model. It mainly focuses on the positions of the breeders, the multipliers, and the structural steel, including their material proportions in the blanket interior. It was found that the temperature field in the pure breeder region Li4SiO4 is relatively independent and has little influence on the adjacent regions because its location is closer to the first wall. The first beryllium zone only affects the adjacent regions and will not repeatedly affect the remote areas. The second beryllium zone and the first mixed-pebble zone of the Li/Be zone are mainly limited to the structural materials due to the sensitivity of the temperature limitation of 550°C. This work will have very important support and reference for future fusion blanket engineering.