“There is however an even more fundamental problem with the design which caps its maximum output. The reactors are cooled externally at the surface. As the size of the reactor grows, the core of the reactor gets hotter, since the cooling from the surface cannot reach effectively to the core. Beyond a certain size, the core cannot be cooled effectively enough from the surface to prevent a melt-down. This puts a theoretical upper limit to the size of these Shaitan reactors, and thus to the maximum power output possible.
“The problem is that the maximum power output for the volume of space that the Shaitan design reactor occupies is not that great compared to the theoretical limit of a human tokomak design, or that of this Ka-Let fusion reactor. Why is that so? It is because the Shaitan design divides the fusion process into billions of micro cells inside the reactor, with each cell fusing a few hundred atoms at a time. That might sound like a lot of atoms being fused, but in reality, even a few trillion atoms fusing at a time continuously is not that stupendous a power output as it might initially sound. It is just good enough to power a few thousand homes or a spaceship at the current pathetic acceleration rate, but not good enough to power a city or this mighty Ka-Let ship at the acceleration needed to reach here from Proxima Centauri in two decades.
“In the amount of space that the Shaitan design occupies, once can fit in quintillions upon quintillions times of the trillions of atoms that it currently fuses. The reason the Shaitan design can’t do so is because most of the reactor is filled in with the material of the reactor itself, i.e. the micro cells. This it is extremely inefficient in terms of space utilization.
“Now I come to the pros and cons of the human tokomak design, and the related Ka-let fusion reactor design. Its strengths and weaknesses are almost the opposite of that of the Shaitan reactor design. This design has an open space inside the reactor for the hydrogen gasses to be squeezed in as densely as required. Consequently one can theoretically get an output even a million times greater. However please note my use of the term ‘theoretically’. The choice of word was deliberate, because it leads me to the greatest weakness of the design which had led us humans to abandon this design in the first place when we found out about the Shaitan design.
While the Shaitan design reactor’s core temperature would rise to a few hundred degrees Celsius at the core and almost room temperature at the surface, the hot plasma in a tokomak design reaches a hundred million degrees Celsius. That is far hotter than even the core of the sun, which is by comparison at a cool fifteen million degrees Celsius. These reactors need to heat the plasma at a higher temperature than even the core of the sun to speed up the nuclear fusion. The fusion speed of the sun’s core is actually fairly slow, but it is made up by the tremendous size of the core. For a smaller reactor like ours, it is not viable to have a chain reaction run that slowly. Thus the need for higher temperature.
In any case it does not matter if the plasma is burning at a hundred million or just fifteen million degrees. There is no matter in this universe that can hold such a hot plasma together. The sun holds it together due to its tremendous gravity. Gravity ensures that the plasma is crushed by the rest of the sun in a perfectly symmetrical manner. The heat of the plasma at the core is transferred to the rest of the sun, which is what we see and feel as solar radiation. We don’t have that option for making a reactor, so we have to look for another means of containing the hot plasma.
The tokomak contains the hot plasma in a very strong electromagnetic field, because the plasma is stripped off its electrons, and hence is positively charged. So problem solved, right?!” Dr. French asked rhetorically and paused for effect. “Not so fast!
We humans don’t know of any way to create a spherical magnetic field to enclose the plasma inside, in an analog to the way the Sun bottles up its core. The best magnetic bottle that we humans can create is a torus shaped one. Unfortunately this is not a very reliable shape to ensure that the nuclear chain reaction would continue uninterrupted. Even a small defect in the toroid magnetic bottle in terms of a temporary weak spot in the electrically created magnetic field or a small misshape of the torus would catastrophically release the hot plasma heated at a hundred million degrees. Needless to say that this is not a very desirable outcome!
Consequently our tokomak designs are not very reliable to sustain a nuclear fusion reaction for a long enough time reliably, because sooner or later in a matter of a few minutes or a few hours at best, the perfection of the magnetic bottle would be broken ending the fusion reaction. We just don’t have the technology to hold a perfect magnetic required for that design. If we had, then we would have a far superior nuclear fusion reactor than the Shaitan design.”
Dr. French paused to look at Benedict to ensure that he was with her till this point. Benedict nodded to let her know that he understood. Benedict Parsons may not be a nuclear physicists, but he was no slouch in physics and most of what Dr. French was explaining was in the realms of engineering rather than theoretical physics. Engineering was Benedict’s domain. Satisfied, Dr. French continued.
“This is where the Ka-let design can give us a breakthrough – in the design of a magnetic bottle for the nuclear fusion. We have been staring at the designs of these Ka-Let fusion reactors and wondering for over ten years as to how they might function. We have not found any apparent way to contain the nuclear plasma inside the reactor because we were looking for a toroid structure similar to our human tokomak design. Obviously such a structure doesn’t exist inside.
It has been only in the last six months that we started thinking on a completely different line. We asked ourselves the question – what if the Ka-Let did not depend on clever geometry of a torus to contain the plasma, but on something very simple. One of the simplest ways to contain a hot plasma which cannot touch anything is to put it in a container of any shape as long as the entire internal surface of the container is charged negatively. That way the plasma will not be able to touch the internal surface of the container and hence remain contained.
Only, there is a fundamental problem in creating such a container – it violates the fundamentals of physics and electricity as we know it! Electricity needs a negative and a positive poles. It is not possible to have just one pole. Unipole charge of electricity or magnetism is just not possible. Scientists have been hunting for unipoles for centuries, but they might as well hunt for unicorns! Well gentlemen… it seems that Ka-Let found the Unicorn!” Dr. French stood there with a smile as she paused her lengthy exposition.
“Is that it? You tell me the Ka-Let found the Unicorn and made their fusion reactors work?! Of course they made their reactors work! I already know that, for that is what they used to come here from Proxima Centauri! Is there something that is going to be said in this presentation that I don’t already know?” Benedict blurted out, disappointed and losing his patience.
“Why yes Mr. Parsons! We have something to say that you don’t know. We think we know how to recreate the Unicorn!” Dr. French replied with a triumphant smile.
Benedict was gaping like a fish. It took him some time to recover his composure before he asked. “You mean to say you have cracked it?! Are you guys telling me that we have finally figured out how this damn Ka-Let fusion reactor works?!” Benedict was dubious and skeptical. Many such claims had been made in the past decade about the Ka-let reactor and all had come croppers. It was generally accepted by engineers across the world that humans most probably did not have the science to understand the technology of the reactor.
“Well… yes, with lots of riders and qualifications.” Dr. French said. Her confident demeanor suddenly taking a visible beating.
“What Dr. French means to say is that we are fairly confident of both the science and the engineering involved. We even have a fully working and validated computer simulation model of the reactor, which we would gladly put out for peer review… I know it is hard for you to believe our words immediately after so many false claims that have been made before by others, but this tim
e it is for real believe me. Let Dr. French take you through the details.” Uhuru added quickly, speaking fast, betraying his desperation.
Benedict took a deep breath to calm himself down, and said. “All right. I have all the time in the world. I have come all the way to Mars for this, so let us dive into the details. May be you can start Dr. French, with explaining to me this business about unipoles. I may not be a Ph. D in physics, but I am a decent enough Engineer to know that such a thing cannot exist.
“That is exactly the beauty of the Ka-Let engineering solution Mr. Parsons!” Dr. French replied, having regained her earlier confidence and optimism. “The Ka-Let have not exactly created a unipole with only negatively charged surface. What they have done is to create a container within a container, separated by an insulating material. The inner container is negatively charged while the outer container is positively charged. In effect it is like two electrically charged plates facing each other and separated by air, one positively charged while the other is negatively charged.
There is no Unipole Mr. Parsons, but the cleaver, simple and elegant engineering gives the same effect! The inner negatively charged container is the reliable physical plasma bottle that ensures reliable and continuous containment of the plasma, which in turn ensures reliable and continuous operation of the nuclear reactor!” Dr. French added excitedly. Clearly she was just getting started and had a lot more to add. Being the scientist that she was, she decided to inject a bit or realism into the presentation.
“I am oversimplifying of course. The engineering of the reactor containment bottle is far more complex and sophisticated than the picture I draw, but the basic principle is exactly that – dead simple. There are kinks in the electromagnetic bottle, but even they have been used cleverly for the purpose of letting out the waste helium atoms out, while replenishing the reactor with new deuterium and tritium isotopes of hydrogen to achieve continuous reactor burn. The kinks are necessary to supply electricity to the containment bottle to sustain the strong electromagnetism of the container surface, and that engineering necessity has been used beautifully and elegantly for the aforementioned purpose.”
Benedict leaned forward and began to query the nuclear physicist and her team into every detail he could think of, slowly getting more and more excited as he grew less and less skeptical of the team’s claims. It was possible, just possible, that humans had cracked the final puzzle of Ka-Let on Mars. The only piece of technology that the humans hadn’t understood till that point of time.
Benedict knew better than any other human that even if they began to understand the way the fusion reactor worked, it did not mean that humans would be able to replicate and build one themselves. Sir Isaac Newton would have understood the principles of many things that humans used in the present world, but that did not mean that Newton could have built those machinery using the technology of his own times. Exactly in the same way, it might be possible that humans may understand the machinery of the Ka-Let fusion reactor, but lack the manufacturing technology to build one themselves.
Benedict’s mind was racing ahead as he queried the scientists. He realized that a new team was now needed to study the Ka-Let reactor. The physicists had done their job in understand the physics of it. Now they needed engineers to study the reactor and try to figure out how it was built. They would have to study every one of the thousands of individual parts that this reactor must be built from, in order to replicate it.
Would it be possible to transport one of these reactors back to Earth? Possibly not. Even if they could somehow use the space elevator on Mars to lift such a huge reactor to space, there was no craft big enough to make it land on Earth safely. The only way it could be transported would be by dismantling it and then reassembling it. That was not advisable with a piece of machinery that you barely understood. No… the engineers would have to come to Mars!
Over the course of the next few days, Benedict barely got enough time to sleep as he worked out the detailed plans, consulting back with his office on Earth. He was still going to shut down most of the other operations on the site and hand it over to a scientific caretaker institution, which would run with a skeletal staff. That would save the program tons of money. Benedict would use that money and much more to massively boost the presence of materials engineers, process and manufacturing engineers and reactor specialists on Mars.
Benedict needed to go on war footing to quickly use the greatest bounty that Ka-Let technology could provide the humans – the promise of an engine that could in theory be limitless in its energy output, as one kept making it bigger. This was as significant a technology that would give humans an advantage over the Shaitans as the harvester, if not more. The Ka-Let had reached from Proxima Centauri to the Solar system in just over two decades powered by those powerful nuclear reactors. If not for those reactors, the Ka-Let would have taken centuries to reach here in the Solar system.
With such powerful engines, it would not just give humans a critical advantage over the Shaitans. This engine could enable a human ship to reach the heart of the Shaitan Empire in less than a decade. That would make it feasible to strike right at the core of their civilization and cut the head of the beast!
Chapter XXX
Shaitan’s Folly
World #2, Home system of the Shaitans
2121
There are meetings and gatherings in the history of the galaxy which determined the course of a civilization, a race or a group of races for the better or the worse. Such gatherings are rare and only occur a few times in the history of a race. The participants of this gathering were not aware of the profound historical import of the meeting they were about to have (people in such occasions rarely are, at the moment it happens). Unfortunately for the Shaitans of this Grand Council, the turn taken by their beings after the meeting would be for the worse, and they would be infamously remembered as the council that committed the biggest folly in the history of their race.
The full session of the Grand Council was a cumbersome affair and hence rarely held. Even when they were held, many of the sessions were more ceremonial in nature rarely requiring real time interactions. There was a simple and practical reason for this – speed of light. The Grand Council was a body representing the decision makers of all the worlds of the Shaitan race, as was the way of their beings since ancient times.
In theory all worlds were equally represented and their voice carried equal weight. In practice it worked very differently. Seer Taste of Water, the designated conductor of this council session knew the history of the institution of the Grand Council and why it functioned the way it did. Unlike the warriors, who had started dominating the Council of Seers in all the worlds in this time of war, he was a member of the curious caste and a student of antiquity.
The Council of Seers was an institution that always existed even before the time of the ‘Great Sorrow’, when Ka took some of them and enslaved them on Ka’s own home world, which was to become their beings’ World #2 later. After the ‘Great Awakening’, when their beings took over Ka’s world and made it their own world, it presented an administrative and legislative headache to be able to coherently govern two worlds with uniform law and enforcement.
After the ‘Great Cleansing’, when millions upon millions of their beings had to be terminated on account of heresy, the Shaitans were particularly paranoid about any world drifting from the ‘path’ they had discovered in the ‘Great Awakening’. To ensure that all laws and enforcement of the laws were in accordance with the ways of their beliefs, the Grand Council had been formed a few generations after the ‘Great Cleansing’.
It had started with equal representation of elder members of the Council of Seers of each of the two worlds. The time lag of signals between the Origin world and World #2 was a few seconds at the worst when they were at the furthest, and far less most of the times. So it presented no practical problems in having a virtual conference of the two Council of Seers of the two worlds.
For historical
reasons, the Grand Council sessions were always hosted by World #2. This reflected the new reality at the time of the ‘Great Cleansing’. It was World #2 which had experienced the ‘Great Awakening’, and it was from that world that the word of the holy message had spread to the Origin World. It was also the Origin World which had experienced the ‘Great Cleansing’, having most of their original inhabitants terminated and replaced by beings from World #2. The balance of power at that time was clearly in favor of World #2.
As their beings expanded ever further into the void, and the worlds inhabited by their beings spread further apart in terms of distance and hence time delay, having a real time Grand Council session with equal participation became impractical. However, the institution of the Grand Council by that time had become sacred and it could not be changed, so the format of the sessions had to be altered to suit the new reality of time delays.
Grand council sessions were planned sometimes hundreds of cycles in advance. Everyone was given the agenda and time to prepare their views. The views of the further off worlds’ seers were played on the tasting stations along with their taste and odor signatures in the Grand Council chamber on World #2. After the views of all other worlds had been presented, they were debated real time by the members of the Grand Council of World #2 and the origin world. Resolutions were adopted and forwarded to all worlds. If any world had an objection to the resolutions adopted, they could raise them in follow-on sessions. Resolutions adopted in the Grand council chamber were however, rarely objected by other worlds. So, what had started as an egalitarian system of governance with all worlds equally represented, had slowly turned into a central governing force dominated by World #2 and to a smaller extent by the origin world.
This however was not a planned session. This was an emergency session of the Grand council, and therein lay the problem. World #11 had justifiably called for an emergency session of the Grand Council after the catastrophe faced by the ‘Great coalition force’ that had been gathered to face the threat of the Ka-Baal. As per the established protocol, World #11 had simultaneously informed all the other worlds of their beings about the emergency session. This ensured that they could send their views without the delay of World #2 having to send the news out to all the other worlds centrally.
Triumph & Defeat (Shaitan Wars Book 4) Page 9
