louisehourcade Chapter 273 Planetary Energy
Chapter 273 Planetary Energy
Yu Ying's conclusion caused nearly an hour of silence at the core team meeting.
Creating sunlight. This phrase has a formal name in physics: controlled nuclear fusion. Humanity has been researching it since the 1950s, for a full seventy years. In those seventy years, over two hundred tokamas and stellarators were built worldwide, burning through hundreds of billions of dollars in research funding, achieving a record of 102 seconds of continuous combustion, less than two minutes. Each ignition was initially announced as a breakthrough, only to face the same fundamental problem: the plasma could not be confined. Like trying to hold a ball of fire in your hands, no matter how tightly you clench your fingers, the fire will always find a gap and dissipate.
Zuo Cheng read that sentence over and over again, then looked up at Shen Yiming.
"People seventy years ago didn't have the Heavenly Cycle. We do."
The following morning, Shen Yiming's quantum team was summoned to the conference room of the aerospace division. Zuo Cheng wrote a line on the whiteboard: "From this day forward, all computing power of Tianyan-2 will be prioritized for controlled nuclear fusion simulation." The meeting reached a consensus within twenty minutes: half of Tianyan-2's 5,000 qubits would be allocated to run global plasma confinement simulations year-round. The other half would continue to support quantum communication and the web-weaving protocol, operating in parallel.
That afternoon, Yu Ying connected the entire global nuclear fusion database to Tianyan. For the first time, all the data locked in the laboratory server—including ITER experimental data, the ten-year operating record of the EAST toroidal converter, plasma parameters from Japan's JT-60, and inertial confinement results from the US NIF—were analyzed together on the same machine.
Three months later, Tianyan-2 completed the largest full-scale simulation of plasma turbulence in human history. The simulation covered all scales from millimeter-level eddies to meter-level macroscopic instabilities, with an equivalent computational load exceeding the total of all global fusion simulations over the past seventy years.
The conclusion was concise. Yu Ying projected the results onto the large screen; it consisted of only three lines.
First line: The biggest bottleneck in the tokamak approach is not temperature. Plasma has already reached 150 million degrees Celsius, more than ten times the temperature of the sun's core. The bottleneck is energy leakage caused by turbulence. Turbulence tears energy away from the plasma core, like trying to fill a leaky bucket with water in a storm.
The second line states: If active control forces can be applied to the plasma surface in real time to precisely suppress the generation and propagation of each turbulent vortex, the energy confinement time can be increased by at least five times.
The third line: increased from tens of seconds to hundreds of seconds. Hundreds of seconds means that self-sustaining combustion can be achieved.
No one applauded in the meeting room. Not because they weren't excited, but because everyone was waiting for the next sentence. Zuo Cheng then spoke.
"Connect the quantum control system to the EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak) system."
Yu Ying and her quantum team completed the entire plan over the next two months. The plan was codenamed "Star Core." Star Core does not build a new tokamak, nor does it design a completely new fusion device from scratch. What it does is something else entirely: upgrade the quantum control systems of existing fusion experimental devices around the world. China's EAST tokamak, ITER's auxiliary devices, and even several private companies' fusion prototypes are all connected to the same quantum real-time feedback system.
In the notes on the first page of the project, Yu Ying wrote: "Nuclear fusion isn't a lack of breakthroughs in basic science; it's a lack of progress in control engineering. Each plasma vortex takes less than a millisecond to form and disappear, exceeding the response limit of any classical control system. But quantum feedback isn't classical. The response speed of quantum feedback is protected by the lower bound of the uncertainty principle, allowing it to suppress the vortex at its source before it's fully formed. Seventy years ago, no one could build a quantum computer. Now we can. All that's left is pressing the shutter."
Three months later, the quantum feedback module was installed into the control circuit of the EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Toy) system.
On the day of ignition, the entire control room was packed. Nearly thirty members of the EAST team flew in from Hefei, sitting in the front row wearing identical blue work uniforms. Zuo Cheng and Yu Ying stood in the back. Ge Lilin was in the very front row; his hair was completely white. The last time he came to Hangzhou was a few years ago when he was the vice president of the State Grid Corporation of China, to sign a contract for space photovoltaics. This time, he came as a nuclear fusion researcher, someone who had been working on fusion projects since the 1980s.
Plasma ignition. 100 million degrees. 120 million degrees. 150 million degrees.
On the turbulence monitoring screen, the curve representing vortex energy density changed from violent oscillation to stability the instant the quantum control system was activated. Not a drawn-out stability; it was genuinely stable. Each vortex, just beginning to curl, was canceled out by a precisely opposite-phase pressure wave. Not suppression, but cancellation. Like dropping another drop of opposite-phase ripple onto the surface of a drop of water just as it's about to burst open; the two drops disappear simultaneously the instant they touch.
One hundred seconds. Two hundred seconds. Three hundred seconds.
At four hundred seconds, the breathing in the control room could be heard. Not panting, but the kind of low, synchronized sound of everyone breathing at their slowest possible frequency. Like the whole room slowly exhaling.
507 seconds.
The plasma automatically extinguished. Not due to control failure, but because the set experimental time had expired. The star core system automatically triggered the exit procedure at the 507th second.
The control room was silent for about three seconds. A young man in a blue work uniform in the front row stood up first, then the second one next to him. Then the whole row, then the entire room.
Ge Lilin didn't stand up. He sat in the chair for a long time, then took a very old notebook out of his pocket. The cover was worn through, and there was transparent tape on the corners. He turned to the last page and wrote a line in the blank space. After writing, he closed the notebook, stood up, and walked into the empty conference room next door. He wasn't going to make a phone call. He was going to be alone for a while.
When Zuo Cheng followed him into the conference room, Ge Lilin had already wiped his eyes, but the redness in the corners of his eyes was still there. He stood facing the window for a while, then turned around.
"Seventy years," he said. "Three generations. My mentor wasn't sure if fusion would ever happen. Today, it's proven to be real."
Zuo Cheng said, "It's not proof. It's the beginning."
That evening, Yu Ying wrote a sentence in her project notes. She had conducted a separate simulation of the star core's excess computing power: if the star core-level micro fusion reactor were shrunk to a size that could fit inside the Pioneer, the spaceship would no longer need to collect sunlight. It could produce its own sunlight.
She added a line at the end of that sentence: Put the sun on the ship, and it can go anywhere.
At the same moment, Zuo Cheng opened the system panel for a routine check. A new connection appeared between the quantum technology branch and the space photovoltaic branch. The line was thin, light gold in color, and was still slightly changing shape. Below it was a line of small text: Conditions for the germination of the potential energy technology branch are forming. This branch does not belong to the current twelve-branch plan as an independent branch, and may appear as a derivative leaf of the tenth branch.
He turned off the panel and walked to the window. The stars were bright in the Hangzhou night sky, and satellites continued to streak across the heavens one after another. He remembered the line of text that Ge Lilin had written in his notebook an hour ago. He didn't know what it said, but he could guess.
Seventy years. Three generations. A notebook.