The Honest Gates, Stated Plainly

The breeder record names the open physics questions it has not closed — chiefly the tritium-breeding-ratio reconciliation and the center-post lifetime — rather than presenting a finished machine.

Naming the gates builds trust

A design study that reports only its successes is not a validation record; it is advertising. The breeder (Hyperion) program states its open gates as findings of equal standing to its results. Three are load-bearing for the breeder specifically.

• Local-vs-net tritium breeding ratio: at the target TBR of 1.8, the reconciliation between an idealized local breeding figure and a realistic net figure (blanket coverage, penetrations, losses) is open.
• Tritium self-sufficiency: not yet proven. The machine must breed more tritium than it burns plus decay and process losses, and that closure is a design target, not a demonstrated fact.
• Center-post lifetime: the compact spherical-tokamak center stack sits in a hard neutron field; a limited-lifetime note (order 0.01 full-power-years for the most exposed element) is recorded as an engineering constraint, not waved away.

Gates are physics, not price

These are stated as physics and engineering facts. None is translated into an economic quantity anywhere in the record. A gate is a thing the machine must be shown to do, and the honest position is that it has not yet been shown.

This page describes a design-and-simulation study, not a built machine. Construction of the breeder (Hyperion) begins Q2 2027; first-of-a-kind first tritium is targeted near 2030. No hardware net-gain claim is made before FOAK.