In controllable nuclear fusion facilities, there is an extremely important concept: the Q value.

It is the ratio of the output energy to the input energy of a nuclear fusion reactor.

Assuming 1 MJ of energy is input to start and maintain the fusion, but the nuclear fusion reactor can only produce 0.8 MJ of energy, then the Q value is 0.8, which is less than one, meaning it's running at a loss; this set of reactor technology clearly lacks practicality.

As early as the human era, people had already mastered controllable nuclear fusion technology, and had even achieved a Q value of around 5.

However, this technology still faced enormous challenges.

Firstly, the ignition time was insufficient. Such a device could usually only operate for a few minutes before shutting down, unable to sustain itself for long periods.

Secondly, a Q value of 5 was still far too low.

If the Q value concept were used to measure nuclear fission reactors, their Q value would typically be maintained above 100.

The Bluetoth's mature nuclear fusion reactor technology typically maintains a Q value above 300.

That is, if 1 MJ of energy is input to maintain the nuclear fusion reactor, it can produce more than 300 MJ of energy.

The difference between these is like heaven and earth.

Before the Bluetoth arrived in the solar system, Tom had also conducted some research on controllable nuclear fusion for a period and achieved some results. However, with the subsequent large-scale military preparations, this area of research was halted.

Now, under the guidance of approximately 200 Bluetoth controllable nuclear fusion experts, Tom has once again picked up this technology.

Soon, a massive nuclear fusion reactor was constructed.

It looked like a giant stone, over twenty meters high, and forty to fifty meters in both length and width, making it extremely large.

However, most of the facilities within it were auxiliary. The area used for nuclear fusion itself was only a small part.

This small area was circular, like a pipe.

Outside this pipe, various dense facilities were at work.

At this moment, some deuterium and tritium gas for ignition were fed into it.

The deuterium-tritium mixed gas was first ionized, and then, under the action of a magnetic field, it entered the reaction area.

Afterward, Tom used methods such as neutral beam injection, radio frequency heating, and laser heating to raise the temperature of this mixed gas to over one hundred million degrees Celsius.

At such high temperatures, no known object could directly come into contact.

So how could they be confined? After all, once they dispersed, the pressure would decrease, and nuclear fusion could not be maintained.

At this point, a technology Tom had previously studied for secondary pressurized propulsion and used in electromagnetic cannon came into play.

Magnetic confinement technology.

By forming a magnetic field with electric current, an invisible magnetic field is used to confine the high-temperature gas without any physical contact, preventing it from scattering or dispersing.

Under the powerful magnetic field, within the toroidal reaction chamber, although this deuterium-tritium mixed gas possessed enormous energy and pressure, it still could not disperse.

Thus, the nuclear fusion reaction finally began to occur.

Under extremely high temperatures and pressures, deuterium nuclei and tritium nuclei finally overcame the Coulomb barrier, began to approach each other, and ultimately combined into an unstable intermediate nucleus, which then rapidly split into helium nuclei and a neutron.

During this process, approximately 0.375% of the mass was converted into energy, which was radiated outwards in the form of helium nuclei and high-energy neutron.

Tom only supplied some tritium gas to this nuclear fusion reactor at the very beginning; he did not add any more later, only continuously supplying deuterium.

But how can fusion be maintained when the nuclear fusion reaction occurs between deuterium and tritium, and tritium gas is not replenished?

Here, Tom used a special technology.

Tritium self-sustaining technology.

Simply put, the cavity wall material of the toroidal reaction chamber contains lithium elements. The deuterium-tritium fusion process releases high-energy neutron, and these high-energy neutron bombard the lithium elements, causing lithium nuclei to react with the neutron, producing tritium and helium.

Thus, lithium is continuously converted into tritium gas, and the tritium gas is then replenished into the reaction chamber, continuously reacting with the deuterium gas input from outside. After the reaction consumes the tritium gas, it is again converted from the lithium in the cavity wall into tritium, and so on, in a continuous cycle.

This is tritium self-sustaining technology.

Through this technology, the nuclear fusion reactor avoids the problem of needing to replenish large amounts of tritium gas.

Because tritium has a very short half-life, only a little over a decade. Natural tritium hardly exists in nature, making it impossible to extract.

At this moment, nuclear fusion has begun. The energy generated by nuclear fusion is collected through the heat dissipation device of the toroidal reaction chamber and used to boil water for electricity generation.

This heat primarily comes from high-energy neutron. The other part, the energy-carrying helium nuclei, is used to heat the deuterium-tritium plasma to maintain the fusion environment.

Thus, a complete nuclear fusion device completed its entire operational process.

At this moment, this enormous nuclear fusion reactor was continuously operating. In the control room far away, hundreds of Bluetoth scientists, along with many clones, closely monitored its operational status.

The Bluetoth scientists, of course, understood the principles and composition of the entire nuclear fusion device, but this was, after all, a complete scientific apparatus, involving numerous technical details; without millions of people, one couldn't even remember the relevant knowledge.

At this moment, these hundreds of Bluetoth scientists only knew the technical framework, and Tom still had to research a large number of technical details himself.

But even so, it had already saved Tom an unknown number of years and an unknown amount of effort.

This nuclear fusion reactor ran for a full hour before being controllably shut down.

Tom joyfully saw that throughout the entire operating cycle of this nuclear fusion reactor, if the total energy input from outside was recorded as 1, the energy it produced reached 12, meaning its Q value reached 12!

Directly surpassing the most advanced technology of the human era!

To put it simply, this nuclear fusion device can be considered practical, just at a relatively low level.

Tom did not rush to apply it on a large scale. Instead, under the guidance of the Bluetoth scientists and with the vast amount of data collected from the Bluetoth Civilization, he continued to conduct research and experiments.

Generation after generation of iteration and optimization, while simultaneously conducting numerous other crucial scientific researches, approximately ten million clones consistently dedicated themselves to the research of controllable nuclear fusion.

With all these conditions combined, Tom's controllable nuclear fusion technology developed rapidly at a speed that astonished the Bluetoth scientists.

In less than 50 years, the Q value of Tom's latest generation of controllable nuclear fusion reactor had already reached 260, about to catch up with the Bluetoth's most advanced technology!

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