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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.
Xin Mao, Xuebing Peng, Peng Liu, Siqing Feng, Wei Song, Xinyuan Qian, Tiejun Xu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 81 | Number 8 | November 2025 | Pages 901-915
Regular Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2025.2503122
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A single divertor module is generally composed of an inner target (IT), a dome, an outer target (OT), and a cassette for a tokamak fusion reactor. As the plasma-facing components (PFCs), the IT, dome and OT are highly likely to be destroyed, while the cassette, in principle, is not damaged. The neutron irradiation dose anticipated for the China fusion engineering test reactor (CFETR) divertor is about one order of magnitude higher than that of ITER. Therefore, the neutron-rich environment in the future device needs the implementation of teleoperation for component replacement.
These days, divertors have two maintenance strategies, integral and separated, respectively. In the second version, the water-cooled divertor design of CFETR, a separate maintenance scheme was chosen in which a damaged PFC is removed from the vacuum vessel. The overall structure design of the IT, the remote handling (RH) compatibility of the IT, and the IT stainless steel support design are presented first in this paper. Then, a material choice suitable for the IT target is discussed. Finally, a hydraulic analysis of the IT cooling system and a thermal analysis of the bolts are carried out to testify to the rationality of the IT target structure design. This provides a possible technical solution for the PFC structural design in the fusion reactor divertor.