Chapter 260: Laser Components

“This process of this explosion takes a very short time, only a few picoseconds. As long as three or four such explosions occur every second and continue without break, the energy released will be equivalent to a million-kilowatt power station!”

Upon hearing Little X’s explanation, Chen Chen nodded immediately. “I know a little about the tokamak device, but I remember that the tokamak has a huge flaw. The other one is the inertial confinement fusion reactor. Does the Earth Federation have similar devices?”

“Yes, the tokamak device that represents magnetic confinement does have a big flaw because the core of the tokamak device is where the magnetic field appears. To generate a magnetic field, you need to use a coil. With a coil, there’ll be an electrical lead and with an electrical lead, there’ll be resistance.’

Little X replied, “The more practical a tokamak device is, the stronger the magnetic field has to be and the greater the current that must be passed through the lead. Thus, the resistance of the wire comes into play. The resistance will reduce the efficiency of the coil and limit the intensity of the current so that the tokamak device can’t generate an adequate magnetic field.

“As such, superconducting technology is very important. Today’s Earth Federation has made low-temperature superconductors into coils so that the problem with both the volume and the loss of current can be solved. Therefore, the combination of this superconductor and the tokamak device is called the super tokamak device.

“Today, there are only three continents in the Earth Federation that have a super tokamak, namely the North American Continent, Mainland China, and the European Continent. Of these, there are five in North America, two in China, and one in Europe.

“As for inertial confinement fusion reactors, this equipment is available in many countries and continents all over the world, but the one that is truly famous is the National Ignition Facility Project in North America or NIF for short.

“This device focuses 2 million joules of energy through 192 laser beams onto a deuterium-tritium pellet with a diameter of 3 millimeters. Each laser beam discharges for about three-billionths of a second, generating a high temperature of 100 million degrees. The pressure exceeds 100 billion atmospheres, which triggers nuclear fusion.”

“I got it.”

Chen Chen snapped his fingers. “In other words, magnetic confinement nuclear fusion uses a strong magnetic field to confine deuterium and tritium in a magnetic container, heating it to hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius to achieve fusion reactions. On the other hand, inertial confinement uses ultra-high intensity lasers, irradiating deuterium and tritium in very short bursts to produce the fusion reaction.”

After understanding this, Chen Chen looked at the nuclear fusion reactor technology from Elysium and suddenly saw the light at the end of the tunnel.

In simple terms, the focus of each of the two technologies, magnetic confinement and inertial confinement, was not the same. The magnetically confined super tokamak device had a good nuclear fusion reaction effect and did not require repeated ignition, but was disadvantaged in that it was large and rather inflexible. Moreover, the cost of electricity required to maintain a strong magnetic field was not low.

Therefore, the super tokamak device was used as a nuclear power plant reactor in Elysium’s world.

The advantage of inertial confinement was that the equipment could be made to be very small and one would have more control over the ignition fire. Even so, the disadvantage was that it had to consume a lot of energy to generate lasers for continuous ignition.

Therefore, the inertial confinement device was used as a spacecraft engine in Elysium’s world.

Chen Chen reviewed these two technologies and compared them with the nuclear fusion devices of the countries in the Earth Federation. He found that the biggest factor. Other than conceptual innovation, that allowed these two types of nuclear fusion devices to be produced in Elysium’s world was the normal-temperature superconductor.

The normal-temperature superconductor eliminated the need for a liquid helium cooling system in the super tokamak device, thus greatly reducing its complexity and cost. Coupled with the stability of high-displacement metal, a mature nuclear fusion device was naturally a matter of course.

The same was true for the inertial confinement device. The normal-temperature superconductor could increase the energy released by the laser ignition device several times over, thereby augmenting the laser’s energy, even forming a laser effect called “ultra-high field”. This would instantly produce an output of 200×1015 watts, which was 100,000 times larger than the total global electric energy output, yet took only less than one trillionth of a second.

With this energy, the fuel formed by deuterium and tritium could reach the critical point of nuclear fusion at once. One would not require something as complicated and huge as the NIF device, whose efficiency was not high enough anyway.

Even so, the only caveat was that if one wished to create a mature super tokamak, one still needed to use materials like high-displacement metal. Chen Chen was not capable of producing this high-displacement metal for the time being. To do so, he would need the help of particle accelerators.

Chen Chen could only flip to the page “High-Displacement Metal” and pore over its contents.

The so-called high-displacement metal was a kind of aluminum. However, it was not normal aluminum, but an isotope of aluminum.

Generally speaking, metals such as aluminum did not produce isotopes, but with the help of particle accelerators, artificial interference and manufacturing became possible.

For example, the high-displacement metal made of metallic aluminum was essentially an aluminum element with a high number of excess neutrons. One would first rely on superconductivity at room temperature to form a strong magnetic field, then used a particle accelerator to fire iron atoms through the strong magnetic region.

As the magnetic field in this region had reached an energy level that could break apart an atom, the iron atoms would disintegrate when passing through the magnetic field. The electrons would fly to one side of the magnetic field, while the protons would fly to the other side, leaving only the neutron which continued to fly forward, unaffected, while maintaining its flight trajectory.

After this, as long as these neutrons were collected by a resonance machine and electrons were attached to the surface of the neutrons with a strong electric combiner, virtual particles could be produced.

Due to the virtual particles being negatively charged, one only had to use the particle accelerator again to accelerate the virtual particles and accelerate them to a subluminal state, so that they could be used to bombard aluminum atoms.

As they had attained subluminal speed with immense kinetic energy, these virtual particles could overcome the repulsion force and forcefully penetrate the aluminum atom. In this way, the aluminum atom would be filled with a large number of neutrons, causing the element structure to shift. This was why it was called high-displacement metal.

Due to the high imbalance of neutron content, this material was extremely insensitive to energy conduction and completely nullified thermal energy weapons and thermal wave weapons. Coupled with super metallic strength and durability, it was far better than any alloy. The datasheet even named it the toughest substance within the solar system.

Since it was impossible to manufacture a super tokamak device, Chen Chen could only step back for now and build the other type — the inertial confinement device reactor.

To build this kind of reactor, Chen Chen would have to purchase many high-precision laser equipment components, then modify them to create a device that could emit ultra-high field lasers.

As he considered this, Chen Chen instinctively stroked his chin.

It looked like the time had come for those financial groups to be put to work. Had he not united this bunch of people precisely because of the influence they possessed?