Foundry, Not Power Fleet
The breeder fleet is measured in isotope output and neutron-hours, not installed capacity; it is an industrial source, not a utility.
Two different kinds of fleet
A power fleet grows to meet electricity demand and is measured in installed capacity. A foundry fleet exists to supply a material and is measured in output per year. The breeder is the second kind. Confusing the two leads to the wrong questions about scale and purpose.
What the foundry supplies
- Tritium, the bankable base product, near 4 kg/yr per unit class
- Helium-3 coproduct, near 1.97 kg/yr per unit
- 14 MeV neutrons for materials irradiation and isotope production
Why not scale to power
The breeder needs only fusion gain, not net electricity, and its economics rest on materials rather than megawatts. Scaling it into a power fleet would demand the net-electric threshold it is deliberately designed to avoid, and would size the fleet to an energy market it was never meant to serve. The burner is the machine designed toward energy at fleet scale.
Operating as a foundry
Foundry operation prioritizes availability, reproducibility, and accountancy: keeping units running, producing consistent output unit to unit, and tracking every gram of tritium. These priorities shape maintenance design, diagnostics, and the fuel loop far more than any peak-power figure.
This describes intended operation of machines not yet built, and contains no economic figures. The distinction it draws, foundry versus power fleet, is the organizing idea behind why the breeder is built first and kept small.