Helium-3 Supply and Strategy

The burner needs a fuel that barely exists on Earth; the honest response is to name the gap and the two routes that might close it.

A fuel that does not exist at scale

The burner (Aegis / MetroVolt) fuses deuterium and helium-3. Helium-3 is extraordinarily scarce on Earth — recovered mainly as a byproduct of tritium decay in weapons stockpiles, a small and non-scalable trickle. A single commercial burner would demand on the order of 400 times current domestic supply. This is a hard physical fact and one of the machine's four honest gates.

Route one: breed it

The breeder (Hyperion) is a source of helium-3 by design, targeting about 1.97 kg/yr per unit alongside its tritium output (tritium arising in part from decay). A fleet of breeders could seed a helium-3 supply that does not otherwise exist. This is the nearer-term route and the strongest reason the two machines are treated as one strategy rather than two products.

Route two: lunar helium-3

The lunar regolith holds helium-3 deposited by the solar wind over billions of years. Extracting it is a serious undertaking, dependent on space infrastructure that is itself early. We list it honestly as a long-horizon possibility, not a plan with a date. Treating lunar He-3 as imminent would be exactly the kind of overclaim we refuse.

The honest caveat

Until one of these routes delivers helium-3 at scale, the burner's commercial operation is gated. We do not present a fuel supply that is unsolved as if it were solved. The strategy is to close the gate through breeding first and space resources later — and to say plainly that it is not closed today. See the honest gates and impact and the helium-3 gate.