Chapter 516: This Is Impossible!

Translator: Henyee Translations  Editor: Henyee Translations

He almost wasn’t able to breathe.

“One hour?!”

Zhou Chengfu’s fingers were trembling, and he nearly dropped his phone on the ground. His eyes widened, and his wrinkly old face was red from his rising blood pressure.

“How is this possible!”

This is impossible!

There’s no way!

Even the latest Wendelstein 7-X’s achievement was only 30 minutes.

How did they modify the WEGA machine, which was retired in 2013, to be able to achieve a one hour run time?

How the f*ck?

Jiang Liang was sweating bullets as he said, “I-I only just heard about this. I called you as soon as I heard about it… How about… I go to Jinling and see if it’s legit?”

“… It’s fine.”

Zhou Chengfu took a deep breath and gradually calmed down.

Even though he didn’t want to believe it, but since Jinling Daily reported heavily on this issue, it was unlikely that it was fake news.

It wasn’t like it couldn’t be fake, it was just that the only benefit from faking something like this was to make the members of Jin Ling city council happy. It was quite useless otherwise.

After all, private capital investments in these types of large-scale projects were basically negligible. Most of their research funding came from the government. A non-expert article from Jinling Daily or even a scientific journal for that matter wouldn’t come into play in terms of government scientific research funding decisions…

Therefore, since the news was released by Jinling Daily first, the legitimacy of the news source was high.

However, by the time the public heard about this news, Lu Zhou and his team were probably already preparing their Science and Nature theses.

Zhou Chengfu thought about this and had a sliver of fear in his eyes.

He didn’t expect this kid to be this smart. He purposely didn’t respond to his provocative article. Instead, the kid dug a hole and waited for him to jump into it.

Fortunately, he didn’t do anything out of line. Otherwise, this mess would be even more difficult to clean up…

However, Zhou Chengfu didn’t realize something.

Which was that since the beginning, Lu Zhou never viewed him as a worthy opponent. All Lu Zhou did was follow his research plan step by step.

Jiang Liang quietly asked, “Director Zhou, what do we do now?”

Zhou Chengfu had a bitter smile on his face.

What do we do?

He was contemplating this as well.

This would be easy to solve if Lu Zhou was under the same jurisdiction as him. Unfortunately, Lu Zhou wasn’t part of the China National Nuclear Corporation, nor was he part of the China International Nuclear Fusion Energy Program Execution Center.

Simply put, he had no power over Lu Zhou.

It seemed that his usual tactics wouldn’t work here.

Of course, these were all secondary.

The most important part was this one hour magnetic confinement time since it was leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else.

This result in and of itself was breathtaking…

…

In some sense, Zhou Chengfu’s analysis on the television program was correct.

The water-cooled divertor was one of the most important components in the controllable nuclear fusion device. Which was also one of the shortcomings in China’s controllable nuclear fusion field. Without solving the problem of the divertor, theoretically, there was no way for the STAR machine to perform better than the WEGA did.

In other words, if the water-cooled divertor problem was solved, then the domestic tokamak magnetic confinement times would also increase by quite a bit… Of course, there were also other unsolved problems, like the magnetic surface tear of the internal plasma current.

However, this wasn’t it.

To achieve a long plasma confinement time, one would have to solve the heat dissipation problem of the first wall material. Increasing the cooling rate wasn’t the only way to solve this problem.

Improving the control scheme and precisely controlling the external field coil could reduce the direct contact of the plasma and the first wall material. This could produce the same cooling effect.

Even though this approach was more difficult than the water-cooled divertor from a technical perspective, it was very easy from an engineering perspective.

After they created a control scheme, achieving a 30-minute confinement run-time was only a matter of time.

However, Xiao Ai played a crucial role as for how Lu Zhou went from half an hour to one hour.

After the supercomputer was built, he fulfilled his agreement with Xiao Ai and gave it a new home.

His original server acted as a “repeater” between his local network and the internet, which was stored in his home so that he could contact Xiao Ai through his phone.

As for the cybersecurity problems…

Honestly, if someone could hack into the artificial intelligence that the high tech system gave him, he would admit defeat.

After all, anyone that could do such a thing probably didn’t come from Earth.

In short, after Xiao Ai was moved into its new home, it finally did something useful.

Through the control scheme algorithm that was stored in the supercomputer and its analysis of the plasma experimental data, it had greatly improved and optimized the original control scheme algorithm.

On the day of the experiment, Lu Zhou executed the experiment as planned.

Their original plan was to achieve a thirty-minute run time. However, after thirty minutes of experimenting, they didn’t expect the sensors to indicate that the reactor was running normally.

After that, he received a text from Xiao Ai.

[(๑•̀ᄇ•́)و✧].

Therefore, after a short conversation with Xiao Ai, Lu Zhou decided to change the experiment plan on-the-go. He ordered his assistant Sheng Xianfu to continue the experiment and set the experiment target to one hour…

This was the story behind the shocking one-hour run-time achievement.

…

Inside the pure white system space.

Lu Zhou stood in front of the translucent mission panel and confirmed his mission completion details.

1. [Congratulations, User, for completing the “artificial intelligence” technology branch mission!]

2. [“Fusion Light” mission chain]

[Optional branch mission: 1-hour high-density plasma confinement. (complete!)]

The first mission was from his technology branch.

After so many years, he almost forgot it existed.

According to the system’s experience reward rules, leveling up his “artificial intelligence” technology branch to level 2 also gave him 10,000 information science experience points, which leveled up his information science discipline to level 2.

The second mission rewarded him with 50,000 engineering experience points, just enough for him to level up.

Other than that, there were also 500 general points.

This experiment could be considered a huge success.

Lu Zhou closed the mission panel and ordered, “System, open my characteristic panel!”

A blue light swept across the screen. Soon, his updated characteristic panel was presented in front of him.

[

A. Mathematics: Level 7 (144,000/1.2 million)

B. Physics: Level 5 (83,215/300,000)

C. Biochemistry: Level 4 (74,000/100,000)

D. Engineering: Level 4 (0/200,000)

E. Materials science: level 5 (13,000/300,000)

F. Energy science: Level 2 ( 0/50,000)

G. Information science: Level 2 (3,000/50,000)

General points: 5,475 (one lucky draw ticket)

]

[

Technology branch:

Artificial intelligence: Level 2 (0/50,000)

]

Lu Zhou looked at his updated characteristic panel and nodded in satisfaction.

Ever since he activated the controllable nuclear fusion mission chain, he felt like he was leveling up at the speed of light.

The only downside was that he didn’t get a lot of mathematics experience points.

As a mathematician, he couldn’t help but feel a little gloomy…

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