Decades of fusion, distilled into one design.
Kronos did not start from a blank page. Its founders designed the magnets and pioneered the fuel physics behind some of the field's landmark machines — those experiments are, in effect, the prototypes that led here.
Every architectural choice in the HYPERION breeder and the D–³He tandem-mirror burner traces to lessons learned on real hardware — from the record-setting Alcator magnets to the first steady-state helium-3 fusion. This is that lineage.
The Alcator tokamaks · MIT Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory
Carl Weggel designed the Alcator series — including Alcator A, which earned a Guinness World Record for the strongest steady-state magnetic field. Robert Weggel co-designed the Alcator C tokamak magnets at the same lab.
RIGGATRON · ultra-high-field compact fusion magnets (INESCO)
Led a 15-person team on ultra-high-field magnets for the RIGGATRON compact-fusion program, and invented the internally supported Ohmic-heating coil.
Record magnets · Brookhaven National Laboratory
Developed 20 T hybrid magnets and cryogenic superconducting systems; holder of world records for the highest sustained magnetic field. Later consulted for Commonwealth Fusion Systems on large-scale field-coil design.
A D–³He tandem mirror with direct conversion
Our co-founder was among the authors who proposed a D–³He tandem mirror with highly efficient direct energy conversion — the same architecture the Kronos burner refines today.
The first steady-state helium-3 fusion
As Director of the UW–Madison Fusion Technology Institute, Dr. Kulcinski achieved the first steady-state fusion in an inertial-electrostatic-confinement device using helium-3, across successive UW IEC experiments, and championed helium-3 as a clean fusion fuel — including its recovery from the Moon. His 2005 work (Kessler & Kulcinski, Fusion Science and Technology, doi:10.13182/fst05-a640) is cited in the Kronos burner paper as the prior art the staged design extends.
Kronos · the two-machine architecture
Everything above converges: a compact D–T spherical-tokamak breeder (HYPERION) that makes the fuel, and a low-neutron D–³He tandem-mirror burner that runs on it — physics closed, open gaps named, code and data released in the open.
A bench that has built the field.
Beyond the founders, the Kronos advisory bench has contributed to many of the world's fusion and high-energy programs — from ITER and NIF to the leading stellarator and magnet efforts.