The Burner Paper
The burner is a deuterium-helium-3 tandem-mirror generator with direct energy conversion, published together with the four physics gates that make it hard.
What the burner paper describes
The burner paper presents a deuterium–helium-3 tandem-mirror generator in two housings: Aegis, for fixed defense installations, and MetroVolt, for data centers. Its design point uses a 26.49 T plug field, a 17 T throat field, and direct energy conversion — recovering charged-particle energy without a conventional thermal cycle. Because the fuel is largely aneutronic, the neutron fraction is about 5.44%.
Published with its gates
The burner is the harder of the two machines, and the paper does not hide it. Four physics gates are stated as design-and-simulation findings, each linked here in full:
- The plug coil is overstressed by roughly 3–3.9x at the design bore — infeasible as specified; see the plug-coil gate.
- The plug operating regime is 166–830x beyond any existing device — un-post-dictable today; see the operating-regime gate.
- Helium-3 demand is about 400x domestic supply per commercial unit; see the fuel-supply gate.
- Availability of about 0.86–0.995 falls 30–100x short of hyperscale Tier III uptime; see the availability gate.
Why publish a design with open gates
A design study earns nothing by concealing where it breaks. Stating the gates in the paper does two things: it tells honest readers exactly what would have to change for the machine to be real, and it explains why the breeder and lunar helium-3 supply are part of the same program — the burner cannot be fueled at terrestrial scale today. The deposit and DOI are on the DOI map.
The burner is a target, not a claim. The paper is written so that no reader could mistake a simulated tandem-mirror point for a built generator.