The Standards Landscape

A map of the codes and standards a fusion facility designs to, and how they fit together.

Why standards, and which ones

Standards encode hard-won engineering experience and give regulators, insurers, and partners a common yardstick. A fusion facility touches many standards families at once: nuclear quality assurance, pressure-boundary codes, instrumentation and control, functional safety, cybersecurity, radiation protection, and materials qualification. Kronos designs to recognized standards rather than inventing private criteria.

How the families relate

• Quality assurance is the umbrella: it governs how every other standard is applied and documented.
• Pressure and structural codes govern the physical boundary; materials standards feed them.
• Functional safety and I&C govern how the plant is protected and controlled.
• Cybersecurity protects the control and safety systems from digital compromise.

The regulatory context

For a facility whose primary output is byproduct material — isotopes and neutrons — a byproduct-material regulatory framework (in the United States, an NRC Part 30 approach) is a natural fit and is being pursued through pre-application engagement. Standards and regulation are complementary: standards say how to build well, regulation says what is permitted, and both are approached openly.