Honest Gates and the Resource Case
The four canonical burner gates are physics facts, not economics; stating them alongside the water and land advantages is what earns trust.
The water, land, and resource advantages on this site are real, but they sit beside four honest gates for the burner (Aegis / MetroVolt). These are physics-and-engineering findings from design-and-simulation studies, never economic statements. Presenting them plainly, next to the advantages, is the whole point of full-candor communication.
The four canonical gates
- Plug coil overstressed ~3-3.9x at the design bore — infeasible as specified; a magnet-engineering gate.
- Plug operating regime 166-830x beyond any existing device — un-post-dictable today; a plasma-physics gate.
- Helium-3 fuel demand ~400x domestic supply per commercial unit — gated on a fuel that does not exist at terrestrial scale.
- Availability ~0.86-0.995 versus hyperscale Tier III 0.99982 — 30-100x short on downtime; not a sole Tier-III source today.
None of these is ever expressed as an economic or monetary figure of any kind; they are stated as the physical and supply facts they are. Two of them — the helium-3 gate and the availability gate — bear directly on the resource and siting story and are treated in depth on their own pages.
Why candor is the strategy
The breeder (Hyperion) advances first — construction from Q2 2027, FOAK first tritium ~2030 — and there is no hardware net-gain claim before FOAK. The burner's real water and land advantages do not erase its gates, and pretending otherwise would forfeit credibility. Stating both in the same breath is what makes the environment, health, and safety case trustworthy.