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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.
Iulian Nita, Rodica Pancef, Luminita Nitulescu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 80 | Number 3 | April-May 2024 | Pages 291-302
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2023.2179312
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Fukushima accident led to concerns about enhancement of safety for the new design nuclear plants and also for the existing fleet of nuclear power plants (NPPs) by introducing passive safety systems. An important objective is to increase the grace time for a plant operator to establish an alternate heat sink in the case of a station blackout (SBO) accident. Efforts made by RATEN (https://www.raten.ro/?lang=en) in the frame of H2020 PIACE projects were to implement a passive safety system in the CANadian Deuterium Uranium 6 (CANDU 6) project. In this project, RATEN was in charge of the engineering design and computational modeling aspects, required to integrate a passive safety system in the existing CANDU 6 project. In order to design a passive safety system, a 3-day SBO accident was credited to occur at the Cernavoda Unit 2 NPP, a CANDU 6–type reactor. An isolation condenser (IC) system capable of transporting the total energy produced in the reactor core due to decay heat was designed and modeled. The engineering design solutions were made by RATEN CITON (http://www.citon.ro/english_index.html), and the thermal-hydraulic analysis was performed by RATEN ICN (https://nuclear.ro/en/) using the RELAP5 computer code (https://relap53d.inl.gov/SitePages/Home.aspx) to confirm natural circulation both in the secondary and the primary circuits during the SBO accident and heat transfer capability of the IC with and without noncondensable gases. The passive safety system design consists of four (4 × 33%) closed loop independent circuits, one for each steam generator. Each loop has an IC design to transport 0.66% of nominal thermal power of the reactor. In order to avoid a rapid transient during reactor cooldown, the system is endowed with four noncondensable gas tanks (one for each IC), connected to the outlet header of each IC, provided for reducing the IC heat flux simultaneously with reactor core residual heat decrease. The design concept was adapted to the CANDU 6 reactor power and the specific layout of the Cernavoda site, starting from the Advanced Lead-cooled Fast Reactor European Demonstrator (ALFRED) patent (the demonstrator of lead fast reactor technology) passive system, to increase the plant operator grace time from 23 h (current situation) to more than 72 h.