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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.
Thomas F. Fuerst, Matthew D. Eklund, John A. Leland, Adriaan A. Riet, Chase N. Taylor
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 8 | November 2023 | Pages 1224-1234
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2023.2196237
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tritium breeding is a critical component of any self-sustaining future fusion reactor. The liquid-metal eutectic PbLi is of particular interest as a tritium breeder material due to its favorable thermophysical and neutronic properties. One of the several remaining challenges facing PbLi breeder blankets is the need to design and validate a highly efficient tritium extraction system. The vacuum permeator is a promising extraction concept that utilizes tritium permeation through a highly permeable metal membrane. The Tritium Extraction eXperiment (TEX) is a forced-convection PbLi loop constructed to investigate tritium extraction from PbLi with vacuum permeators. Accurate thermal-hydraulic and tritium transport models are required to establish appropriate test matrices, predict experiment outcomes, and analyze data. However, the hydrogen transport properties of PbLi and permeator materials have large uncertainties. A database is collected and a parametric analysis is conducted on the effect of hydrogen transport material properties, including diffusivity of H in PbLi and the permeator, solubility of H in PbLi and the permeator, and the permeator surface recombination constant, on the expected tritium extraction efficiency for a vacuum permeator installed in TEX. Herein, we observe that the solubility of H in PbLi and the permeator and the recombination constant of the permeator have the largest effect on extraction efficiency.