Design Codes and Standards We Work Toward

Established engineering codes encode hard-won lessons; we design toward them and are explicit about where fusion pushes past existing codes.

Standing on accumulated lessons

Engineering codes and standards are compressed experience: rules written in response to real failures so they are not repeated. Designing toward recognized structural, pressure, nuclear, and quality standards means inheriting that experience rather than rediscovering it the hard way. We treat applicable codes as a floor, not an aspiration.

Where fusion outruns existing codes

Some fusion conditions have no settled code yet: combinations of field, neutron spectrum, and materials that existing standards were not written for. Where that happens we say so, work from the nearest applicable code with justified adaptation, and flag the gap rather than pretending a code covers a case it does not. An honest gap is safer than a borrowed rule applied out of its domain.

Quality standards, not just design standards

• Design codes for structures, magnets, and pressure boundaries.
• Nuclear and radiological standards for tritium and 14 MeV neutron handling.
• Quality-management practice governing how analysis and records are kept.
• Documentation standards so the work is auditable.

Working toward codes is part of the same commitment as verification and margins: it is how a design earns the right to be built, not just computed. And where the codes do not yet reach, saying so plainly is itself the standard, because the alternative is a false assurance dressed in a code number. Held together, working toward codes and being candid about their gaps are two halves of one honesty: we inherit the field's accumulated caution where it exists, and we flag, rather than fake, the places where fusion has moved past it.