Site-Selection Criteria
Choosing where Aegis goes on an installation balances stand-off, cooling, distribution, geotechnics, and separation of redundant units.
What the site has to provide
Site selection reconciles competing needs: distance from mission-critical occupied structures (stand-off), access to a heat-rejection medium, a short and robust path to the distribution bus, sound geotechnics for heavy foundations, and enough area to separate redundant units. No single factor dominates; the chosen location is the best compromise across all of them.
The main factors
- Stand-off from occupied and mission-critical structures
- Heat-rejection medium (water body, cooling towers, or dry cooling)
- Short, protected electrical path to the critical-load bus
- Geotechnics adequate for high-field magnet foundations
- Area for physical separation of redundant units
- Secured space for on-site fuel inventory
Trade-offs
Placing units close together saves land and shortens cabling but weakens separation and common-cause protection. Placing them far apart strengthens redundancy but lengthens feeders and cooling runs. Siting near a natural water body eases heat rejection but may conflict with flood exposure. Each installation resolves these against its own mission and terrain.
Radiological and regulatory setback
Although the burner is low-neutron (5.44% neutron fraction), it is not aneutronic, so shielding and a modest radiological setback are part of siting. These are engineering setbacks, planned into the layout from the start rather than added later.
Site selection is presented as a framework; the numbers are site-specific and settled per deployment, always within the fixed-installation constraint. In practice the location is chosen by scoring candidate sites against all of these factors together, since optimising any single one — shortest cabling, best cooling, maximum separation — usually degrades another.