The burner's reference point assumes no alpha channelling at all. That is deliberate: alpha channelling has never been measured at any scale, so building the baseline on it would make the whole design conditional on an unmeasured parameter. Kronos declines to do that.
Alpha channelling would redirect fast-ion energy to useful channels, and the literature calls the effect speculative in its own words. The channelling track established that radiative benefit needs an efficiency of at least 0.577 and the converter benefit at least 0.875 — with no measurement of the efficiency existing at any scale. The required-versus-demonstrated gap has no denominator.
And in this ledger, channelling barely helps: sweeping its efficiency from 0 to 1 moves the gain from 0.632 to 0.597 — it goes down, because it cools the electrons and shortens confinement. Channelling is a radiation lever, not a gain lever, so the baseline loses nothing by excluding it.
| Baseline channelling | none (eta_alpha = 0) |
| Measured efficiency | none, at any scale |
| Radiative benefit needs | eta_alpha ≥ 0.577 |
| Converter benefit needs | eta_alpha ≥ 0.875 |
| Gain effect 0->1 | 0.632 -> 0.597 (down) |