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2026 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
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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.
Andrew M. Irvin, Ehab Hassan, Sebastian de Pascuale, Mark Cianciosa, Rhea L. Barnett, Livia Casali
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 82 | Number 1 | January-February 2026 | Pages 64-78
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2025.2476829
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The complex and iterative nature of plasma scenario optimization in fusion devices necessitates the use of reduced models in early stages of the design process to filter through a large parameter space in an efficient manner. Ray-tracing codes, such as TORAY, offer considerable advantages in run time for electron cyclotron (EC) heating and current drive (H/CD) cases over full-wave codes while maintaining a high degree of fidelity. We deploy the Fusion Reactor Design and Assessment (FREDA)–TokDesigner workflow to enable training of a surrogate model for EC H/CD radial profiles based on the TORAY ray-tracing code, coupled to the Integrated Plasma Simulator (IPS)–FASTRAN framework. The surrogate model is trained to predict key H/CD profile characteristics for EC cases based on a subset of plasma and EC launcher parameters for a Compact Advanced Tokamak (CAT) design point. The CAT was selected as a baseline to assess the performance of the surrogate model trained in the fusion pilot plant regime. The surrogate model is able to accomplish this an order of magnitude faster than TORAY coupled to IPS-FASTRAN while still maintaining a high level of accuracy. The surrogate model demonstrates invertibility, being able to solve the inverse problem to generate an accurate parameter space for a set of desired H/CD profile characteristics.