The Open Gates: What Is Not Settled

A standing list of the physics and engineering questions Kronos considers genuinely open — the honest inventory of what hardware still has to decide.

The open inventory

Honesty is easier to check when the open questions are written down. Kronos maintains an explicit list of gates that remain unsettled. These are not rhetorical hedges; each is a concrete thing a built machine will decide one way or the other.

Breeder (Hyperion) open gates

• Whether the built plasma reaches the 9.66 MA current and confinement of the design point
• The real tritium breeding ratio in a physical blanket — treated as a lever across 1.1 / 1.5 / 1.8, measured value unknown
• First-wall and component lifetime under 14 MeV neutron fluence
• Availability and duty cycle of a sustained D-T plasma

Burner (Aegis / MetroVolt) open gates

• Whether a stable magnetic well exists at feasible beta — the central plug-density caveat
• Achieving and holding the 26.49 T plug and 17 T throat fields
• Net-electric closure through direct energy conversion at the 5.44% neutron fraction

We would rather publish a long list of honest unknowns than a short list of premature certainties. When a gate closes — in either direction — this inventory is updated and the change is dated.