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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.
Norihiro Ikemoto, Hironori Shiraishi, Akira Tsuguchi, Mutsumi Nakamura, Naoki Mizuniwa, Satoshi Akamaru, Masanori Hara
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 81 | Number 6 | August 2025 | Pages 580-590
Regular Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2025.2456894
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A tritium removal system (TRS) has been designed and installed. The TRS can remove tritium leaked into a workspace (100 m3). The tritium removal process in the TRS is a wet method in which leaked tritium compounds are oxidized to tritiated water by a catalyst, and the tritiated water is captured by a molecular sieve bed. The tritium removal performance (TRP) of the TRS was evaluated using H2 and CH4. The TRP is expressed by the relationship between the tritium oxidation efficiency of the catalyst bed and the water-capturing efficiency of the molecular sieve bed. The oxidation efficiency of CH4 increased with increasing the catalyst temperature, and it reached to 0.75 around 280°C. The water-capturing efficiency was found to be 0.97 during the operation.
The relationship between the oxidation efficiency and the water-capturing efficiency was reconstructed to chart and evaluate the tritium removal time. The chart evaluating the TRP of the TRS satisfied the design requirements. The design and evaluation method of this TRS can be applied to other TRSs using the wet method.