There was no need for Chen Chen to host the press conference on Project Xingtian. He had just exchanged a few words with Xia Yin when Little X suddenly sent him a message.
On the phone, the message from Little X was: Just a few minutes ago, during the experiment of the inertial confinement reactor, there was a suspected atmospheric pressure leak.
Therefore, Chen Chen no longer cared about Xia Yin. He turned around and left in a hurry.
After stepping out of the Blacklight Dome, Chen Chen quickly got into Cheng Cao's car and said, "Cao, go to the Spire as fast as you can, hurry!"
However, before he could finish, Little X's voice came from the car speaker again. "Sir Godfather, actually... It was a data error just now. The inertial confinement reactor is operating normally..."
Chen Chen: "..."
Cheng Cao curiously glanced at Chen Chen through the rearview mirror. "Boss, are we still going to the Spire?"
"Yes, I'll take a look around."
Chen Chen waved his hand and said helplessly.
Immediately, the car slowly started and left the Blacklight Dome.
The inertial confinement reactor that Little X mentioned was the nuclear fusion device that Chen Chen had created based on the Elysium dimension technology. Since the end of last year, major financial groups had provided Chen Chen with a large number of high-precision laser components according to his requirements.
Chen Chen even discovered that among these laser components, some were spare parts of the official NIF facilities in North America. He did not know how these families had managed to get their hands on the laser generator of the NIF project.
After the reactor was assembled, after several months of experiments, this inertial confinement reactor had been successfully ignited thirteen times in a row, causing the internal deuterium-tritium fuel to undergo a nuclear fusion reaction, forming a miniature sun with a diameter of one centimeter.
Not only that, but after many parameter corrections, this inertial fusion reaction could be maintained for more than five minutes. The Q value had easily broken through the number 10 and reached as many as 18 points.
Seeing that the world's first true controllable nuclear fusion reactor was about to succeed, but there was an atmospheric pressure leak at the last moment, Chen Chen naturally panicked.
Fortunately, it was just a false alarm.
Half an hour later, when Chen Chen took the elevator to the Spire Experimental Base, he happened to see a newly built giant building standing in the southwest corner of the underground space.
This was a shed-shaped building that looked like an assembly line factory. At this time, there were dozens of Black Knights going in and out of this place, looking very busy.
This shed-shaped building was the inertial confinement power station built by Chen Chen.
Unlike nuclear fission power plants, nuclear fusion was a completely clean energy source, and the only substance produced after the reaction was water. Also, because of the harshness and uniqueness of nuclear fusion, once the reactor malfunctioned, the reaction would automatically stop, and there would be no accidents such as nuclear radiation spread.
Therefore, Chen Chen was assured that the nuclear fusion factory would be built in the underground Spire Experimental Base.
As Chen Chen walked into the factory, the first thing he saw was a huge cylindrical building with a diameter of more than thirty meters.
The entire building was made of reinforced concrete. Inside the five-meter-thick building was the inertial confinement reactor.
Who would have thought that in this huge skyscraper-like building, there would be a temperature of hundreds of millions of degrees and an ultra-high pressure of more than 100 billion atmospheres that had never been seen on Earth?
Chen Chen looked at the console on the side, then looked up and asked, "X, what's the situation now?"
"We have successfully ignited 15 times in a row. The reaction time of the inertial confinement fusion reactor has exceeded one hour. So far, the Q value has exceeded 20."
"Has the problem of insufficient stability been solved?"
Chen Chen could not help raising an eyebrow when he heard this. "I remember that in the previous experiments, the room-temperature superconductor couldn't completely stabilize the plasma, right?"
Little X replied, "The reason it's difficult to stabilize is that once the plasma undergoes nuclear fusion, it becomes very turbulent, and the phenomenon of dispersing occurs, which leads to the termination of the reaction. To solve this problem, I specifically went to the world's major forums to put up a reward, and modified the backend data to make my question worth hundreds of experience points.
"In other words, whoever can solve my question will receive more than a hundred experience points from the website.
"In order to gain experience points, the high-energy physicists have offered suggestions and come up with 341 methods, but in my opinion, they're all useless.
"In the end, I found a really useful answer from an ID named 'Sun Yuanchuan, the Zhao Nuclear Man' in B Hu —"
Little X continued. "Add 0.1 mg of heavy elements to the deuterium-tritium fuel pellet as the core. Because the heavy elements will gather toward the center of the sphere, after the fusion reaction, the pellet will maintain a certain high temperature and pressure state, maintaining the plasma temperature and pressure toward the center of the sphere.
"Because this pressure is maintained, the pellet doesn't immediately undergo full-scale fusion. A part of the energy of the plasma on the surface will be released to the surrounding reaction chamber, keeping the two in balance. The pellet will neither expand nor contract, and the fuel in the pellet will be squeezed to the surface in an appropriate amount to participate in the reaction, making the reaction more durable and stable..."
"It's that simple?"
Chen Chen was taken aback. "Could it be that that person was a genius in particle physics? X, can you find out his true identity? "
"I've already looked into it. This person opened a studio with only himself, responsible for writing adverts, online ghostwriters, trademark squatting, and many other businesses."
"..."
It had to be said that no matter how sophisticated the nuclear fusion equipment Chen Chen replicated was, no matter how much he restored the technology of Elysium's dimension, there would always be a technological gap.
However, what Chen Chen did not expect was that Little X would take a different approach and solve a big problem by brainstorming. Although this would result in the reactor power not reaching the level of the original version, it was enough for Chen Chen.
In fact, the fundamental meaning of the so-called inertial confinement nuclear fusion was to hit the energy of multiple lasers on a tiny target containing nuclear fuel in a very short period of time, creating a miniature nuclear fusion and releasing a large amount of energy.
After the first nuclear fusion ended, the reactor would automatically load a new fuel target, igniting nuclear fusion again and again in this way, thereby obtaining a large amount of energy.
The real difficulty in this, in addition to the supersymmetrical laser components, was that the laser generator needed to consume a huge amount of electricity to ignite and form a fusion reaction.
In other words, it was not enough to form a nuclear fusion reaction. The energy produced by the nuclear fusion reaction must be greater than the energy consumed by the ignition of the laser generator.
Therefore, the gain factor of nuclear fusion energy — "Q value" had to be mentioned here.
The ratio of "output energy and input energy" was called "Q value". Q greater than 1 meant that "output was greater than input". If the cost was taken into account, if it was a steam turbine that burned a boiler, the "thermal efficiency" was about 40% -70%. If some other losses were taken into account, it could be roughly considered that Q = 2.5 was the true cost price.
In other words:
At Q0, the realization of a fusion reaction was a sign of a breakthrough in the principle of human fusion reactors.
At Q1.0, the output energy was greater than the input energy, which was a sign of "break-even".
At Q2.5, the output energy was still greater than the input energy after it was converted into electricity, which was the real sign of a breakthrough in "practical" nuclear fusion.
Q50, on the other hand, was a sign that after the output energy was converted into electricity, it could be "commercialized".
Therefore, there was a common saying in the field of particle physics: "Anyone who doesn't talk about controllable nuclear fusion with a Q value is playing the fool."
At this time, the Q value of Chen Chen's inertial confinement fusion reactor had been raised to more than 20, which was more than enough to maintain.
The only regret was that Chen Chen did not use the method of "boiling water" to generate electricity because there was insufficient underground space and it could not withstand a large amount of hot gas emissions. Therefore, Chen Chen used the "ferrofluid power generation" technology that was not very efficient in converting electricity.
This technology was not a technology from the dimension of Elysium, but one of the technologies that already existed in reality. The principle behind it was also very simple.
The miniature sun in the reactor was actually a high-temperature plasma confined by a magnetic field. The plasma was also a charged particle system composed of positively and negatively charged particles. According to the Lorentz force, as long as the positive and negative charged particles were concentrated on the two poles of the conductor using a ferrofluid device, a potential difference could be generated. After that, as long as a wire was connected, the current could be directly output.
The advantage of this ferrofluid power generation technology was that it was easy to operate and there were almost no technical difficulties. The disadvantage was that the efficiency of electricity conversion was not high. Otherwise, the current Q value of the inertial confinement fusion reactor was likely to have exceeded 50.
It should be noted that the nuclear fusion reactors that were currently at the forefront of the world could only maintain a Q value of around 1.5. There was still a long way to go before they could truly reach a self-sufficient value of 2.5.
Still, in any case, Chen Chen could at least confirm that the nuclear fusion reactor in the Spire Experimental Base was officially a success. This would also be the first truly mature nuclear fusion reactor in human history.
According to Little X's calculations, the output power of this reactor could reach a maximum of 200,000 kilowatts. Although it did not seem like much, the energy consumed by it was only a drop in the bucket. It was far more cost-effective than a nuclear fission power plant.
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