Chapter 283: Gain Factor Value Q

Naturally, the next segment of the conference concerning Project Xingtian did not need to be hosted by Chen Chen. After Chen Chen’s brief exchange with Xia Yin, he suddenly received a message from Little X.

The contents of Little X’s message on the phone were that just several minutes ago, while running the usual experiment with the inertial confinement nuclear reactor, there seemed to be an atmospheric pressure leak detected.

Chen Chen had no time to deal with Xia Yin as he hurriedly took his leave.

When Chen Chen stepped out of the Blacklight Dome, he immediately entered Cheng Cao’s car and belted the order, “Cao, get me to the Spire as fast as you can, hurry!”

Before he had time to finish his sentence, Little X’s voice took over the car’s auditory system, “Sir Godfather, it was a numerical error, the inertial confinement nuclear fusion reactor is operating as usual...”

Chen Chen, “...”

Cheng Cao curiously shot a look at Chen Chen using the rearview mirror. “Boss, still headed for the Spire?”

“Let’s go, I’ll just take a look around there.”

Chen Chen shrugged with his hands and instructed.

The engine started soon and they left the Blacklight Dome after that.

The inertial confinement nuclear fusion reactor which Little X spoke of was the nuclear fusion device that Chen Chen built based on his study of the technology in the world of Elysium. Since the end of last year, each major financial group had provided Chen Chen with a large number of high precision laser components based on his specifications.

Chen Chen even discovered that some of these laser components turned out to be spare parts for official NIF facilities in North America. It was largely unknown what sort of methods these families employed that they could even get their hands on the laser components from the NIF project.

It had been several months since the successful assembly of the inertial confinement nuclear fusion reactor. In this duration, it had been successfully ignited a total of thirteen times during various experiments. The internal deuterium-tritium fuel had catalyzed a nuclear fusion reaction, which transformed it into a miniature sun with a diameter of one centimeter.

Furthermore, after revisiting the parameter calculations many times, the inertial confinement nuclear fusion could now be maintained for more than five minutes. The Q-value had effortlessly broken through the ten-digit reading, reaching up to eighteen-digit now.

Just when he was so close to seeing the world’s first truly controllable nuclear fusion reactor coming to fruition, there were suddenly reports of atmospheric pressure leak. It was no surprise that Chen Chen panicked at the notion.

Fortunately, it was just a false alarm.

Half an hour later, when Chen Chen took the elevator and arrived at the Spire Experimental Base. He saw a newly erected gigantic structure by the south-west corner of the underground space.

This was a standard shed-structured building resembling an assembly line factory. At this time, dozens of Black Knights were constantly coming in and out of the building. They appeared very busy.

This new shed-structured building was the inertial confinement power station Chen Chen had constructed.

Unlike nuclear fission power plants, nuclear fusion was a completely clean source of energy where the only byproduct of the reaction was water. Additionally, due to the harshness and peculiar nature of nuclear fusion, the reaction automatically stops upon meeting any failure condition in the reactor. This way, it negated any chances of unwanted accidents such as nuclear radiation proliferation.

It was for this reason that Chen Chen was not worried about establishing the nuclear fusion factory inside the Spire Experimental Base.

When Chen Chen stepped into the factory, he was immediately greeted with the sight of a gigantic cylindrical structure measuring more than 30 meters in diameter.

The entire building was made of reinforced concrete. Right inside the fortified five-meter-thick building was the inertial confinement reactor.

Who could have ever imagined that this gigantic structure sheltered ultra-high pressure the likes which the Earth had never seen before, with temperature up to hundreds of millions of degrees and exceeding 1,000 atmospheric pressure?

Chen Chen glanced at the control station at the side and then raised his head to ask, “X, what’s the situation now?”

“There had been fifteen consecutive successful ignitions so far. The reaction period of the inertial confinement nuclear fusion reactor had surpassed an hour and the Q value reading had broken through 20.”

“Has the stability issues been addressed yet?”

Chen Chen flicked an eyebrow upon hearing the report. “I remember that in the previous experiment, even the room temperature superconductor was unable to completely stabilize the plasma, isn’t it?”

Little X answered, “The reason it’s difficult to stabilize is that once the plasma undergoes nuclear fusion, it becomes very turbulent. This causes it to disperse and suspend the reaction. To alleviate this problem, I went to the major well-known international forums and offered a reward for a solution. I also modified the database so that my questions would award more than hundreds of experience points.

“Which means that anyone who can solve the question I presented will be awarded more than a hundred experience points on the forum site.

“To get more experience points, the particle physicists fervently contributed and came up with a total of 341 solutions. Unfortunately, I doubt they would be of much use at all.

“In the end, I found an actual useful answer on Zhihu from a person whose ID is ‘Nuclear Boy Sakikawa’.”

Little X continued. “Add 0.1mg of heavy elements to the deuterium-tritium fuel pellets to function as the core. The heavy elements will gravitate toward the center of the sphere, which after the fusion reaction occurs, the pellets will remain in a high temperature and high-pressure state. This will help maintain the temperature of the plasma as well as its directed pressure at the center of the sphere.

“Since the pressure is kept at a constant, the pellet will not immediately undergo omnidirectional-fusion. A portion of plasma energy on the surface will be released to the surrounding reaction chamber, which maintains a balance between the two entities. The pellet will neither expand nor shrink and the fuel of the pellets will be squeezed to the surface in moderate amounts to further the reaction process, making the reaction more durable and stable...”

“It’s that simple?”

Chen Chen was in shock and awe. “Is this person a particle physics savant? X, could you dig up any information about his true identity?”

“I’ve already looked him up. This person founded a studio where he’s the sole employee. It deals with writing software, spambots, trademark squatting[1], and many other aspects of businesses.”

“...”

It had to be said that no matter how sophisticated Chen Chen’s replication of the nuclear fusion design was and how much he tried to mirror the technology in Elysium, there was always going to be a technological gap.

However, what Chen Chen did not expect was that Little X would take a different approach and solve the problem by gathering ideas from the masses. Although doing so may cause the reactor to not reach the efficient scale of the original version, it was more than enough for Chen Chen.

Inertial confinement nuclear fusion.

In truth, the fundamental of inertial confinement nuclear fusion was to aim multiple lasers on a tiny target containing nuclear fuel in a short period. This created a micro-nuclear fusion which released a large amount of energy.

After the first nuclear fusion commenced, the reactor would automatically be refilled with new fuel agents. This way, nuclear fusion was reignited continuously to acquire a vast amount of energy.

Apart from producing hyper-symmetrical laser components, another challenge was that the laser generator had to exhaust a large amount of electricity to ignite and prompt a fusion reaction.

In other words, even if the nuclear fusion reaction was not at the desired level yet, the energy generated by the nuclear fusion reaction must be at least greater than the energy consumed by the ignition of the laser generator to break even.

Therefore, the subject of the gain factor of nuclear fusion energy, otherwise known as – “Q Value” had to be brought up.

Simply abbreviating the “Output energy / Input energy” as “Q Value”, Q exceeding 1 implied that the “output was greater than the input”, this was after factoring in the energy cost. In the vein of a regular boiler steam turbine, the “thermal efficiency” was about 40%-70%. After adding some other miscellaneous losses, a Q of 2.5 could be roughly tabulated as the actual cost.

In other words:

Q value exceeding 0 implied that fusion reaction was achieved. This was a sign of a breakthrough in the fundamentals of a man made fusion reactor.

Q value exceeding 1 meant that the energy output was greater than the energy input, thus “breaking-even”.

Q value exceeding 2.5 meant that the output energy was still greater than the input after being converted into electrical energy. This was the true indication of the success of “practical-use” nuclear fusion.

Q value exceeding 50 implied that the output energy after being converted into electrical energy could be used for profiteering, thus a step toward “commercialization”.

This was the reason that there was this saying in the particle physics field: “Don’t trust anyone who doesn’t discuss the Q value of controlled nuclear fusion.”

The current Q value of Chen Chen’s inertial confinement fusion reactor at this time had reached as high as 20, which was more than enough to cover the operational cost.

One minor gripe was that Chen Chen could not use the “water-boiling” method to generate electricity due to insufficient space in the underground base, which rendered it unable to withstand a large amount of hot air emission. Therefore, Chen Chen resorted to using the “magnetohydrodynamic generation” technique which had lower energy conversion efficiency.

The technique was not acquired from the Elysium dimension as it was a founded technology in the real world and its principle was very simple.

The miniature sun in the reactor was a high-temperature plasma confined by a magnetic field. The plasma within was also a charged particle structure composed of positively-charged and negatively-charged particles. Based on Lorentz force theory, magnetic fluid device charged particles could be used to concentrate the charged particles to two-pole conductors to produce a potential differential. After that, the current could be transmitted as output simply by connecting a wire to it.

The advantage of this form of magnetohydrodynamic generation technique was that it was very easy to operate as there were almost no technical difficulties whatsoever. Its shortcoming was that the energy conversion rate was not exemplary, otherwise, the Q value of the inertial confinement nuclear fusion reactor may have very well exceeded 50.

The current Q value of nuclear fusion reactors in the forefront of the world only hovered around 1.5 and there was still a long way to go before reaching a self-sufficient Q value of 2.5.

One way or another, Chen Chen had verified that the nuclear fusion reactor in the Spire Experimental Base was an unqualified success. This was also the first truly mature nuclear fusion reactor in the world.

Based on Little X’s calculations, the highest energy output of the fusion reactor could reach as high as 200,000 kilowatts. It may not be an impressive amount, but its energy consumption was merely a fraction of the energy generation, thereby making it a far more cost-effective solution than nuclear fission power plants.

[1] The act of registration of a trademark on a product, service, etc. belonging to other companies