Siting Criteria Overview
Water, land, grid, security, and permitting jointly determine where a plant can be built; water-light, compact designs widen the options.
Siting a power plant is a multi-constraint problem. Water availability, land footprint, grid access, security, workforce, and permitting all have to be satisfied at once. A design that relaxes one of the hardest constraints — water — without worsening the others widens the set of feasible sites. This page frames how the Kronos machines sit within those constraints.
The constraint set
- Water: availability for cooling and makeup; the burner relaxes this via direct conversion.
- Land: footprint plus setbacks and interconnection; compact plants relax this.
- Grid: interconnection for backup and export; co-location reduces corridor land.
- Security: relevant especially for Aegis on defense installations.
- Permitting: environmental review covering water, land, air, and radiological aspects.
The burner (Aegis / MetroVolt) does well on water and land and can co-locate with load, but is bounded by the availability gate (~0.86-0.995) for the most uptime-critical sites. The breeder (Hyperion) is compact but carries a thermal load, so water availability or a dry-cooling choice enters its siting.
Honest framing
We present siting as a balance, not a marketing point. The machines relax the water and land constraints meaningfully, which is a real siting advantage, while the availability gate and the helium-3 fuel gate remain honest bounds on where and when the burner can be deployed. The land and water pages give the mechanisms behind each constraint.
The value of framing siting as a balance is that it prevents any single advantage from being oversold. The machines relax the water and land constraints in ways that genuinely widen the feasible-site map, while the availability gate and the helium-3 fuel gate remain honest bounds on which loads the burner can serve and when a fleet can be deployed. A credible site selection satisfies all of these at once.