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Question
When will fusion actually power the grid?
Kronos advances on a gated schedule rather than a marketing date — the G1 confinement testbed is roughly four years to first plasma, with each gate retiring a specific risk.
Kronos frames "when" as a sequence of gates, not a date. That is a deliberate honesty choice: the timeline is only as real as the experiments that unlock it, and the company would rather publish the milestones and be measured against them.
The first and most consequential is G1 — a sub-scale confinement testbed, ~$0.5 B and ~4 years to first plasma, that tests whether the design's confinement bet holds.
Questions & answers
When will fusion be on the grid?
Kronos deliberately does not promise a single headline date. It advances through a gate program in which each step retires a specific risk with a real experiment. The first gate, the G1 confinement testbed, is roughly four years to first plasma and delivers its confinement database about four years after that.
Why not just give a target year?
Because an honest schedule depends on results that haven't happened yet. Kronos publishes its pre-registered predictions and gate structure so progress can be tracked against real milestones rather than a slogan — the opposite of promising a date and quietly slipping it.
What has to happen first?
The load-bearing physics — negative-triangularity confinement, the hot-ion posture, fast-ion channeling — must be demonstrated at G1; the 24.6 T magnet envelope qualified at G2; and the fuel loop proven at G3. Each is a published, checkable prediction.
Honest gapTimelines beyond the gate structure are not promised; they depend on results not yet obtained. G1 is ~4 years to first plasma, with its database at T₀ + 48 months.