MetroVolt Machine Overview
MetroVolt is the Kronos burner core — a D-3He tandem-mirror generator — packaged for siting beside data centers and cities.
One core, two housings
MetroVolt and Aegis share an identical burner core: a linear tandem-mirror confinement machine burning deuterium and helium-3. What differs is the housing and the siting envelope. MetroVolt is the load-following, grid-adjacent configuration meant to sit next to the electrical demand it serves rather than at the end of a transmission line.
The physics is fixed. The plugs run a 26.49 T peak field, the mirror throats 17 T, and only 5.44% of the fusion power leaves as neutrons because the dominant D-3He reaction is aneutronic. The charged-particle-dominated output is what makes direct energy conversion practical, and direct conversion is what removes most of the water a thermal plant needs.
Honest status
MetroVolt is a design and simulation study, not built hardware. The reference plan targets a burner test unit around 2032. No net-gain claim is made for the burner today; the numbers on these pages are design-point results from modeling, stated with their conditions.
- Linear geometry: no closed field lines, no disruptions of the tokamak kind
- Aneutronic-dominant fuel: low neutron fraction, thin activation inventory
- Direct conversion: charged-particle power to electricity without a steam cycle
- Modular: capacity added in discrete units co-located with load
The pages in this section walk the machine end to end — from the central cell through the end plugs, the expander, and the direct converter — and cover siting, water use, and modularity for the data-center context.