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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.
Priyanka Muruganandham, Sangeetha Jayaraman, Kumudni Tahiliani, Rakesh Tanna, Joydeep Ghosh, Surya K. Pathak, Nilam Ramaiya, Aditya-U Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 81 | Number 7 | October 2025 | Pages 702-716
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2025.2485825
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Disruption in a tokamak nuclear reactor refers to the rapid extinction of the plasma confinement. This is often an uncontrolled event that involves the loss of plasma stability and can potentially cause damage to the reactor itself. To ensure the safety of fusion reactors, precise disruption prediction for early identification is crucial. While numerous data-driven time-series models have been developed and are continuously evolving to enhance disruption prediction in tokamaks, these models however often rely on fixed time windows for predictions. Because of the dynamic nature of plasma discharge, traditional models like LSTM, Bi-LSTM, and Stacked LSTM often produce premature alarms that make forecasts too early to determine if a signal reliably indicates a disruption. In this study, we propose a novel dynamic time window aggregation mechanism integrated with a sequential Bi-LSTM model (Bi-LSTM-DTWA), for predicting disruptions. By dynamically adapting to each signal time, this approach enhances prediction performance and effectively addresses the issue of premature alarms. The implemented model is trained using data from the medium-sized Aditya tokamak. Experimental validation on the Aditya dataset, comprising 153 disruptive shots and 67 normally terminated shots with nine diagnostic signals each, shows that the predictive model efficiently forecasts disruptions within 10 to 23 ms in advance without premature alarms, making it suitable for real-time deployment with minimal computational overhead.