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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.
Aleksei Meshcheryakov, Irina Grishina
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 81 | Number 8 | November 2025 | Pages 858-868
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2025.2483060
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In many tokamaks, the effect of improving plasma energy confinement after injecting impurities, and accordingly, increasing radiation loss is observed. In this paper, we experimentally study whether this effect is observed at the L-2M stellarator. We ascertained that for the L-2M stellarator, in the range of operating parameters, the energy lifetime does not depend on the radiation loss power. We propose a mechanism for explaining the improvement in energy confinement observed in tokamaks with limiters after injecting light impurities. The safety factor gradient at the plasma edge increases after impurities are injected, as does the shear of poloidal rotation velocity. As a consequence, turbulent flows are suppressed, resulting in an improvement in plasma energy confinement. In stellarators, this mechanism does not work since the angle of rotational transformation is rigidly set by the coils of the facility magnetic system. The plasma confinement in the L-2M is not deteriorated after increasing radiation loss power due to the action of the plasma self-organization processes.