Availability: An Honest Gate

Firm power is only as firm as its uptime; the burner's simulated availability falls short of hyperscale Tier III, and Kronos says so.

Firmness is not just capacity; it is availability — the fraction of time a plant is actually able to generate. A source can be firm in principle yet fall short if it takes too much downtime. For the burner, availability is an open engineering gate, and Kronos states the gap honestly rather than claiming ultra-high reliability the machine has not demonstrated.

The Tier III comparison

Hyperscale data centers built to Tier III standards target about 0.99982 availability — minutes of downtime per year. The burner's availability in simulation lands in the range of roughly 0.86 to 0.995. That is a shortfall of roughly 30 to 100 times in downtime terms. In plain language: as a sole power source, the burner today cannot meet Tier III uptime; it is a complement, not a standalone ultra-reliability source.

Why stating it builds trust

This is a physics-and-engineering fact, not an economic one, and it is never translated into an economic claim. Availability at this level is a gate that future engineering must close before the burner could serve as a sole source for the most demanding loads. Presenting the number plainly — and framing the burner as a complement today — is more useful and more credible than an availability claim the machine cannot yet support.

• Availability = fraction of time the plant can actually generate.
• Tier III target ~0.99982; simulated burner ~0.86-0.995.
• That is roughly 30-100x more downtime than Tier III allows.
• Today the burner is a complement, not a sole ultra-reliability source.

Design-and-simulation framing. The Kronos machines are today design and simulation studies: the breeder (Hyperion) and the burner (Aegis / MetroVolt). No hardware net-gain has been demonstrated. Breeder construction is planned to begin Q2 2027, with first-of-a-kind (FOAK) first tritium targeted around 2030. Comparisons on this page are qualitative and use only public, defensible figures; nothing here is a performance guarantee.

This gate is stated in full and never softened; closing it is future engineering work, not a claim to make now.