The Honest Gates and Impact
Every impact claim inherits the machines' open gates; here is how the four burner gates and the breeder's open questions bound what we can promise.
Impact cannot exceed what the physics allows
Impact pages describe what firm clean power could do for people, compute, grids, and geopolitics. All of it is bounded by the same honest gates that bound every physics claim on this site. An impact promise that ignores an open gate is not a promise; it is an overclaim. So we collect the gates here and tie each to the impact it limits.
The four burner gates and what they bound
- Plug coil overstressed ~3–3.9x at the design bore — infeasible as specified: bounds every burner impact claim at the design point
- Plug regime 166–830x beyond any device — not post-dictable today: bounds confidence in burner performance
- He-3 demand ~400x domestic supply per unit — fuel gated: bounds burner deployment and its energy-security story
- Availability 0.86–0.995 vs Tier III 0.99982 — 30–100x short: bounds the data-center and critical-infrastructure claims directly
The breeder's open questions
The breeder (Hyperion) has its own honest questions, chief among them tritium self-sufficiency. The breeding ratio is treated as a design lever across 1.1, 1.5, and 1.8, and whether a real machine closes its own tritium cycle is unsettled. That bounds the breeder's fuel-sovereignty claim and its role as a helium-3 source.
And above all: no hardware net-gain claim before FOAK, targeted for first tritium around 2030. Every impact described on this site is conditional on results we have not yet earned. That is not a disclaimer bolted on; it is the frame the whole section is written inside.