Antares small modular reactor reaches criticality in first U.S. Test
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A startup called Antares has achieved a major engineering milestone: its small modular nuclear reactor reached criticality for the first time in the United States, meaning it sustained a nuclear chain reaction on its own. The U.S. Department of Energy confirmed the breakthrough during testing, though the reactor is not yet connected to the power grid or generating electricity for consumers. Small modular reactors (SMRs) are designed to be smaller and potentially cheaper to build and operate than traditional nuclear plants, and they can be deployed in locations where large reactors aren't feasible. The technology appeals to policymakers seeking low-carbon electricity sources and to industrial facilities or remote areas that need flexible power options. Antares' achievement represents genuine progress toward commercializing SMRs, though experts note the reactors still cost significantly more per megawatt than conventional nuclear plants, and the broader question of whether they can compete economically at scale remains unsettled.
Just over a year ago, the Trump Administration issued an executive order meant to accelerate the development of nuclear power in the US. While an entire starup ecosystem has developed around the use of different, and typically smaller, reactor designs, only one of them has been fully licensed so far, and there are no plans to actually build any instances of that design.
The executive order directed the Department of Energy to have three different reactor designs reach criticality in a bit over a year. On Thursday, a startup called Antares announced that a test reactor it had placed at the Idaho National Laboratory had reached criticality, making it the first new design to cross this threshold. Criticality means that the nuclear reactions inside the hardware had become self sustaining; it does not mean the reactor had started to generate power.
Antares is one of a number of companies that is basing their design on a new fuel system called TRISO that takes some of the complexity and safety out of the reactor design and places them in the fuel design. The fuel design is based on tiny pellets with a uranium oxide core. The pellets are surrounded by several layers of carbon that can moderate the energy of both the neutrons and lighter nuclei that are released by fission reactions. All of that is encased in a hard ceramic shell that's designed to withstand the highest temperatures that can be produced by the encased uranium.
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