Footprint and Siting
The burner is a long, narrow machine with a compact envelope — no cooling towers, no reservoir — so it fits on constrained industrial sites.
A linear envelope
The burner is fundamentally a long cylinder: central cell, plugs, and expanders in a line, with the direct converters at each end. That shape has a small cross-sectional footprint and a well-defined perimeter, which is easier to shield and to fit into an industrial parcel than a sprawling thermal-plant campus. Critically, there is no cooling-tower field and no large water reservoir, because direct conversion removes the steam cycle.
What the site does not need
- No cooling towers or large evaporative-cooling water — see near-zero water
- No thick D-T breeding blanket, thanks to the 5.44% neutron fraction
- No fuel-storage yard on the scale of combustion plants
- A modest shielded exclusion boundary set by the safety case
Siting next to load
Because the machine is compact and nearly waterless, it can be sited where the electricity is used rather than where cooling water is abundant. That is the premise of co-location: put firm generation on the same campus as a data center or inside a city's load pocket, cutting transmission dependence. The modular unit approach lets site capacity be matched to the specific load.
Exact dimensions are part of the design study and depend on the final unit rating and shielding. What is fixed is the character of the envelope: linear, compact, low-water, and shieldable — the properties that make grid-adjacent siting realistic rather than aspirational.