The Intellectual-Property Record

A book that calls itself the fusion company that shows its work has a tension built into it. The whole argument of these pages is that the design should be open enough to check — published, reproducible, argued in the daylight. And yet a company that intends to actually build these machines, and to keep an American materials capability from being copied wholesale, has to protect the small number of things that must be protected. This section is where those two commitments meet. It records what is public, and it is honest about what is not.

The Granted Patent

The foundation of the portfolio is a single, fully granted United States patent. It is a public document; anyone can read it in full at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

U.S. Patent No. 12,009,112 — "Superconducting, Minimum-Aspect-Ratio Torus for Increasing Fusion Efficiency." It issued on June 11, 2024, having been published as application US 2024/0029903 A1 on January 25, 2024. The underlying application, No. an application on file, was filed on August 1, 2022 — within the first months of the company's life. It is held by Kronos Fusion Energy, and its inventors are the founder and the two magnet physicists described in The People Behind the Work.

What the patent covers is the geometric and magnetic heart of the breeder. In the language of its own abstract, it describes a fusion generator built around a spherical housing, with a set of coils — a poloidal field coil and a toroidal field coil — formed from high-temperature superconducting tape. The toroidal coil is tilted at an angle along its axis, and a graphite-fiber or graphene wrap is used to give rigidity to the structure that must survive those forces. Readers who have worked through the magnet chapters will recognize the shape of it immediately: a compact, minimum-aspect-ratio, high-field superconducting torus is precisely the machine the breeder physics demands. The patent is the legal record of that geometry, filed and granted before a single production magnet was wound.

This is the piece of the portfolio I am most comfortable pointing at, because it is finished. It is not a claim about what might be defensible someday. It is granted, dated, and public, and it belongs to the same design the rest of this book has spent hundreds of pages trying to prove.

What Is Filed But Not Yet Disclosed

The granted patent is the oldest and most public part of the record, but it is not the whole of it. Over the course of 2026, the company filed a set of additional provisional patent applications extending the design in the directions this book has described: the breeder's tritium-and-helium-3 fuel-making cycle, the burner's approach to firm low-neutron power, the direct-energy-conversion train that turns charged particles into electricity, the AI control system that keeps the plasma inside its limits, and the REBCO magnet and winding work that makes the fields possible at all.

I will not say more than that here, and the reason is straightforward. A provisional application is the beginning of a prosecution process, not the end of one. Its claims are still being examined, still being shaped, and disclosing their specifics in a public book would be both premature and, in some cases, self-defeating. So the fact of these filings is stated plainly — provisionals filed, 2026, across those five areas — and their contents are held back until prosecution has run its course. When there is a granted patent to point at, it will be pointed at, the way US 12,009,112 is pointed at now.

Show the physics. Protect the few things that, if given away, would mean the machine gets built by someone with no obligation to build it right.

Why It Is Structured This Way

It would be easy to treat intellectual property as the opposite of openness — the wall you put up so no one can see in. That is not how it works here, and it is not how it should work in a field this important. The physics in this book is deliberately transparent: the equations are shown, the numbers are real, the honest misses are named alongside the wins. That transparency is the point. It is what lets a reader, a reviewer, or a rival check the claim rather than take it on faith.

The patents protect a narrower thing — the specific, buildable engineering that turns a checkable design into a manufacturable machine, and that keeps a strategically important capability anchored where it was invented. The granted patent shows exactly how those two commitments can coexist: the geometry it protects is the same geometry described openly in these chapters. Nothing is hidden that the argument depends on. What is protected is the right to be the ones who build it, carefully, for the long run.