Chapter 1505: Do You Dare to Answer?
“Cough—”
On the lunar rover, upon hearing the soft cough from the communication channel, the man sitting next to Lu Zhou looked at Lu Zhou and asked with concern, “What?”
“Nothing, my nose is a bit itchy…”
Through the face mask of the s.p.a.cesuit, Lu Zhou, who couldn’t touch his nose, sniffed awkwardly. He wanted to sneeze, but it couldn’t come out. This feeling was really uncomfortable.
I wonder if I have a cold.
Putting this matter aside for the time being, Lu Zhou cast his gaze out of the car window and looked at the city leaning on the edge of the crater not far away, feeling a little bit emotional in his heart.
“That blueprint was designed by me, but I didn’t expect that a hundred years later, this place would be so prosperous.”
The man sitting next to him smiled and said, “It seems that everything you expected has been achieved.”
Lu Zhou nodded.
“Sort of, at least half of it has been achieved.”
At this moment, the man in his early thirties sitting next to him was named Ye He, the mayor of Guanghan City. After hearing that East Asia Energy’s site selection for the second-generation controllable fusion reactor was led by Lu Zhou, Mayor Ye personally came to greet him.
After hearing Lu Zhou’s words, Ye He jokingly said with a smile, “Can I ask what the remaining half is?”
Lu Zhou: “Energy.”
The moment he heard these two words, Ye He was slightly stunned.
There was an obvious surprise in his eyes.
Although this was not a secret, for a scholar from the era a hundred years ago, who just woke up from a dormant cabin last month, he was able to point out the biggest bottleneck facing the development of Guanghan City.
“You know this?”
Lu Zhou said with a faint smile.
“Sort of.”
Strictly speaking, the moon was not suitable for the development of densely populated cities. Resources and excessive maintenance costs severely limited the threshold for industrial development here.
Unlike on Earth, where controllable fusion technology had blossomed everywhere, the energy cost of the Guanghan Special Economic Zone was said to be quite high.
It was not that the people here did not want to popularize controllable fusion technology; it was just too difficult to build a nuclear fusion reactor on the moon.
One of the first troubles was the problem of heat acc.u.mulation in a vacuum. According to a rough estimate, the heat sink required to build a generation of fusion reactor could almost cover half of the moon.
Lu Zhou estimated that without the support of the second-generation controllable fusion technology, the development of Guanghan City would stagnate.
This was different from Earth. The entire artificial ecosystem and life-sustaining facilities were completely maintained by energy. In other words, people consumed precious energy from the moment they stepped on the moon.
There were not many people in Guanghan in the early days. It was just a scientific research station. A solar array with a crater area and an energy storage facility the size of a scientific research base could fully meet the needs of the entire colony for a day and night rotation.
However, now, Guanghan City had a 100,000 permanent resident population. As a tourism and commercial research center of the Earth-Moon system, the population here had jumped tenfold.
The energy consumed every day was an astronomical figure. Not to mention that most of this energy gap had to be filled by solar energy facilities, so the urban planning of Guanghan City was designed to be very compact. In order to leave s.p.a.ce for solar energy facilities, they reached the pinnacle of minimalist architectural style.
And this was why most countries simply skipped the moon and moved their colonization directly to Mars.
The second generation of controllable fusion was always hopeless. Whether those helium-3 buried in the lunar soil could be used as a material for the s.p.a.ce age was a mystery. If it was only for t.i.tanium and rare earth resources, the asteroid belt could fully satisfy the supply of Mars and the Earth-Moon system, so there was really no need to dig on the moon.
After arriving at the destination, the group got out of the car.
As Lu Zhou looked at the crater in front of him, he nodded in satisfaction.
The terrain was perfect, and the angle to the earth was also good. Next was the a.n.a.lysis of the geological composition. As long as the geological structure of the lunar soil below was not loose and porous, the location of the experimental reactor was not a problem.
“The conditions here are quite suitable. If there is no problem on your side, I plan to build the second-generation controllable fusion experimental reactor here.
“To be honest, according to the blueprint I designed back then, if there is no second-generation controllable fusion technology, the 100,000 permanent resident population is almost the limit of Guanghan City. The reason why I circled so many helium-3 mines back then was because of this.
“I originally thought that this would definitely benefit the people in a hundred years, but I didn’t expect you guys to come nowhere close to new fusion technology.”
Listening to Lu Zhou’s ridicule, Ye He looked a little embarra.s.sed and said with a light cough, “Um… Whether second-generation controllable fusion technology can be solved is not for me to decide. And I have a confusion here, I don’t know if it is appropriate to ask.”
Lu Zhou said with a smile, “If you don’t understand, just ask, there is nothing wrong about it.”
Mayor Ye said seriously, “The first generation of controllable fusion has the problem of heat acc.u.mulation. Isn’t there a similar problem with the second generation of controllable fusion? I don’t understand why you chose to build a fusion power station on the moon. There is a long-distance power transmission method… Why not build a power station on Earth and send the electricity directly here?”
Lu Zhou: “Heat acc.u.mulation is indeed a problem, but it can be solved. Let’s put it this way. Because the first generation of controllable fusion produces extra neutrons, the design idea of the reactor sh.e.l.l was to recycle the extra neutrons, such as liquid lithium neutron recovery technology, etc. Although these designs can effectively recover neutrons, they do not solve the core overheating problem well and occupy at least 70% of the design s.p.a.ce.”
“… That is to say, because the second generation of controllable fusion will not produce additional neutrons, you can omit a lot of the c.u.mbersome design and leave more design s.p.a.ce to solve the problem of thermal acc.u.mulation?” Ye He nodded and said, “I seem to understand what you mean.”
Lu Zhou nodded approvingly.
“You’re quite sharp—”
“Hey, don’t be fooled by his nonsense!”
A voice suddenly came from the communication channel.
The group of people subconsciously looked behind them and saw an old man in a s.p.a.cesuit walking towards them.
Behind him, there was a young man who was chasing the old man with a wry smile.
Mayor Ye knew the young man was his secretary, but he did not recognize who the old man in front of him was. Mayor Ye frowned slightly and asked, “Excuse me, sir, you are?”
The old man glanced at Lu Zhou, then looked at Ye He. He then said with displeasure, “Qiu Mingrui! You invited me, yet you don’t know who I am?”
Mayor Ye suddenly showed a trace of understanding. He then smiled and said, “Academician Qiu, my apologies. But why are you here today?”
Qiu Mingrui said with a smile, “If I come here later, you would be swindled by this guy.”
Swindled…
What is that supposed to mean?
Lu Zhou looked at the old man who was hostile for no reason and asked curiously, “And who is this supposed to be?”
“This is Academician Qiu Mingrui, an expert from the Inst.i.tute of Nuclear Physics of the Pan-Asian Academy of Engineering!” Mayor Ye said with a smile, “We invited him to do the feasibility a.s.sessment of the project. After all, if you take such a large piece of land, there are certain security risks, so this is a normal procedure.”
“Of course.” Lu Zhou nodded. He then looked at Academician Qiu and said after thinking for a few seconds, “It seems that you are here to stop me. In that case, just get to the point.”
I wonder why he’s angry… or is he always bad-tempered?
After hearing these words, the old man in the s.p.a.cesuit cast his eyes on Lu Zhou and put his words out aggressively.
“I will ask you three questions, do you dare to answer?”