In the tenth year of Chen Yue's all-out research on controlled nuclear fusion, this time, the magnetic confinement fusion route after re-optimization and adjustment finally handed over an answer sheet that made Chen Yue feel a little excited.

In this experiment, the total energy invested by Chen Yue was recorded as 100, and the energy output reached 100.02 for the first time.

For the first time, the output energy exceeds the input energy. In technical terms, the Q value has finally exceeded 1.

Q refers to the ratio of output energy to input energy.

This is undoubtedly a major breakthrough.

Compared with the magnetic confinement route, the inertial confinement route has also undergone ten years of iteration and research by Chen Yue, and the highest Q value is only 0.06. There is a huge difference between the two.

"The inertial confinement route has no future."

Chen Yue pondered: "Why don't you just give up?" Not...... Or go ahead. Anyway, the computing power is idle. Maybe the follow-up inertial confinement route can still have some value. ”

This is also possible. Just like Riemannian geometry, which was originally used to describe surface space, when it was first born, no one thought it was valuable.

It was not until many years later that it showed its irreplaceable value in many extremely cutting-edge physical theoretical researches and became one of the most important mathematical tools.

At this moment, Chen Yue's attitude towards the inertial restraint route is this.

Keep it, maybe you can use it later? Who knows what technology will do in the future.

"In the case of inertial constraints, the key is the laser generator. At present, I can only increase the energy conversion rate of the laser generator to 1% at most, 100 kWh of electricity is used to generate the laser, 99 kWh of electricity is wasted, and only 1 kWh of electrical energy is turned into laser energy. In addition, the reliability of the laser generator is too low, and the fusion fuel cluster only needs to be bombarded a few hundred times before it breaks, and the device has to be replaced...... It's so impractical. ”

In Chen Yue's view, the energy conversion efficiency of the laser generator must be increased to at least 50%, and the reliability must be improved to an average of 100 million times before it is bad, which can be regarded as a bit promising.

At present, it is clear that this goal is impossible to achieve.

"Let's improve little by little."

Chen Yue thought bitterly: "I just remembered that the laser cannon is the principle, continue to study, it will be regarded as a research on the laser cannon." ”

After all, a laser cannon is a larger laser generator.

As a result, Chen Yue still maintained the situation of advancing the two routes at the same time.

In the twentieth year, there was a major breakthrough in the lithium alloy materials researched by Chen Yue.

Lithium alloy materials are of great significance in neutron shielding and tritium self-sustaining.

The so-called tritium self-sustaining means that the nuclear fusion reactor needs to produce tritium on its own to participate in the fusion and maintain the fusion.

In deuterium-tritium fusion, the reserves of deuterium are extremely large, and although there is not as much hydrogen as it, it is also relatively easy to obtain.

Just like Jupiter, it contains about 0.02% deuterium, compared to the volume of Jupiter, deuterium is infinite for Chen Yue.

Tritium is different. Because tritium has a very short half-life, only a dozen years, it is almost non-existent in nature. And it's extremely difficult to make. Even with Chen Yue's industrial capacity, it would require a huge amount of energy to make this thing, and it would even pull the Q value below 1, which would directly lead to the loss of meaning of controlled nuclear fusion.

Even if it is made at any cost, it will not be able to be preserved at all, and before it can be preserved for decades, tritium will decay by itself.

As it happens, tritium can be produced by neutron bombardment of lithium. As much as 70% of the energy produced by deuterium-tritium fusion is released in the form of fast neutrons.

That's just right. Why don't I just use lithium alloy to create a magnetic confinement wall for the fusion device? In this way, the fusion of deuterium-tritium elements releases a large number of high-energy fast neutrons, and the fast neutrons bombard the lithium alloy wall to form tritium, and the tritium returns to participate in the deuterium-tritium fusion to continue to generate neutrons, and the neutrons continue to bombard the lithium alloy wall......

And so on and so forth.

In theory, engineering is extremely difficult to implement.

First of all, the lithium alloy wall must have extremely high heat resistance, and at the same time, it must also have conductivity, so that the heat can be conducted out and used to generate electricity, and at the same time, the retention rate of tritium must be controlled to prevent too much tritium from lying in the wall and not leaving, and if it does not participate in deuterium-tritium fusion again, then nuclear fusion cannot continue, and it can only be extinguished......

At this moment, Chen Yue's material experimental base has finally manufactured a suitable lithium alloy. After adding a certain trace element, and through a special manufacturing method, he created a lithium alloy that fully met the requirements of a fusion reactor.

This is a breakthrough.

The second breakthrough is related to superconducting materials at room temperature.

In the past, superconducting materials could only operate at very low temperatures. This time, after decades of research, Chen Yue finally found a special material.

It is a solid substance with metallic properties made mainly of hydrogen, neon, oxygen and other gases under a pressure of up to 6 million times the earth's atmospheric pressure.

This substance has the ability to superconduct no higher than 63 degrees Celsius, which fully meets Chen Yue's requirements.

After another ten years, Chen Yue completed the small-scale trial production of these two materials. At the same time, at the Magnetic Confinement Route Laboratory, the Q value of the fusion device reached 2.6 for the first time, and the ignition time reached 3 hours.

After replacing these two materials, the performance of the fusion reactor immediately skyrocketed, with the Q value soaring to 7.5 and the ignition time as high as one month.

The ignition time of up to one month refers to the process of neutrons bombarding lithium to form tritium, tritium participating in fusion and generating neutrons, and neutrons bombarding lithium to form tritium, which lasted for a month before the fire was stopped due to insufficient tritium production.

Although this has not yet met the requirements for industrial and commercial applications, it is already a huge step forward.

Chen Yue made persistent efforts, continued to invest a lot of computing power and resources, and continued to work tirelessly in research.

In the fiftieth decade, there was a major breakthrough in the research of plasma physics in fundamental physics. Chen Yue comprehensively improved the plasma steady-state control device of the nuclear fusion reactor, which greatly improved the stability, as a result, the Q value increased to 10.6 again, and the ignition time reached half a year.

From this time on, Chen Yue began to try to build a nuclear fusion power station. In the sixtieth year, the first fusion power station with practical value was built and began to be connected to the grid for power generation. At the same time, research on the miniaturization of fusion reactors was launched.

The power station is experimental and will continue to operate for a long time. The data generated during its operation will become the basis for Chen Yue to further optimize and improve nuclear fusion power generation.

As a result, Chen Yue worked together to increase the Q value, increase the ignition time, increase the overall installed capacity, and miniaturize the fusion reactor.