Helium-3 from the Hyperion Breeder

Hyperion breeds tritium; that tritium decays into helium-3 at a fixed rate, making the breeder a helium-3 generator on a 12.3-year clock.

The breeder is a helium-3 factory

Hyperion is a D–T spherical tokamak whose main product line is tritium — a design-point yield in the ~4 kg/yr class, with the tritium breeding ratio treated as a design lever across 1.1, 1.5, and 1.8. Tritium is radioactive and decays into helium-3. So a store of bred tritium is, over time, a store of helium-3 in the making. Hyperion's design-point helium-3 output is in the ~1.97 kg/yr class as this decay proceeds.

Two products, one stream

This means Hyperion serves two customers at once. Some bred tritium can be used directly (tritium is itself a valuable product for the breeder line), and the fraction allowed to decay yields helium-3 for the burner. The split between held tritium and decayed helium-3 is an inventory decision, not a physics constraint — it is set by how much helium-3 the burner fleet needs and when.

• Breeder product: bred tritium (~4 kg/yr class) plus 14 MeV neutrons
• Decay product: helium-3 (~1.97 kg/yr class)
• Half-life fixes the conversion rate; no separation reaction is needed to make helium-3
• The tritium/helium-3 split is set by fleet demand

No part of this requires the burner to be operating, and none of it claims hardware net gain. The breeder is built first (construction from Q2 2027, first tritium ~2030), and the helium-3 inventory begins accumulating from that point, ahead of the first test burner around 2032.