Chapter 247: Chemical Plant (I)

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Hong Xu stood inside the fantastical "Black Stone Hall," struggling to keep a smile on his face that was "awkward yet polite."

..... The visiting delegation was touring the newly built chemical plant grounds, and as one of the hosts, Hong Xu now had no choice but to play his role well.

Normally, a guy like him who was bad with people wouldn't enjoy this kind of scene, especially when these laymen were swarming around him in droves. In fact, if it weren't for that damn temperament of his, he wouldn't have ended up in the 17th century.

But not today — no matter how good or bad his mood was, he had to handle the reception properly: the Cao Emperor was among the visiting party.

The scene that had unfolded atop the Imperial City days ago had already reached the ears of every Transmigrator who wasn't there. Though no one dared discuss the "West Tomato Incident" openly on the forum, even Hong Xu, who had been holed up in the workshop installing equipment, had since figured out the full story... after all, this matter was too big, tied to his own future — no one dared treat it lightly.

Watching the Cao Emperor mingling effortlessly in the crowd nearby, chatting and laughing, seemingly on intimate terms with everyone, Hong Xu couldn't help but swallow. After steadying his emotions, he plastered on a smile and stepped forward to continue as tour guide — having a bad temper didn't make him an idiot; he knew how to judge people and act accordingly. In front of an Emperor with max combat power who'd swing at you without a second word, it was better to behave...

Before crossing over, Hong Xu had been a technician at a state-owned chemical plant. Since this guy wasn't great at dealing with people — to put it simply, he didn't know how to turn a blind eye — he'd offended his superiors. After repeated reassignments, a top chemistry graduate like him had ultimately been kicked to the post of scrubbing reaction towers.

After barely holding on until the old man passed away, Hong Xu quickly signed divorce papers with his quarrelsome wife — the house went to the woman, the man took only the cash. Fortunately, they had no children.

Before leaving, Hong Xu finally did the one thing he'd always wanted to do: he mailed a package to his direct supervisor, containing a sealed bottle... then he promptly fled. Even though the package was sent anonymously, he knew full well it wouldn't hold up under scrutiny — the moment that bottle was opened, it would be a capital murder case.

After arriving in the 17th century, Hong Xu quickly fell in love with the place — chemistry was a lofty, top-tier star technology, and he and a few fellow chemists received ample "attention and respect" in Dayuan.

The attention was mandatory, because every great killer capable of upgrading society was inseparable from chemistry: explosives, pesticides, fertilizer, sulfonamide, and so on and so forth. One must realize, humanity entered the steam age of steel ships roaming everywhere in the 18th century, yet the first synthetic ammonia unit didn't appear until the early 20th century.

In short, the moment high temperature, high pressure, corrosion, and toxic gases — the daily routine of chemistry — come into play, many industrial systems that look decent on the surface immediately reveal their underwear.

The Kiln Area Base was no exception.

In the year-plus since landing, the Kiln Area Base had grown from nothing, from crude to complete, costing the Industrial Party members countless blood, sweat, and tears. Yet this construction path, in its general direction, was more about probing the lower limits.

That is to say, over this year, the Industrial Party had actually poured most of its energy into completing the production capability for basic industrial goods like screws. Aside from a portion of essential, high-end, compact industrial equipment (such as lathe motors, chips, and lead screws), the Kiln District's import quotas were all used on acquiring primary-level equipment.

Even so, building a small yet complete industrial system was no easy task.

Back in the day, the rabbits at least had the old big brother's aid in constructing over a hundred factories to start with — and what did the Transmigrators have? A 2.8-meter crate only came once every six days. To fight over a quota of space the size of a watermelon, multiple inter-departmental brawls had broken out over the past year — whenever the end-of-month quota allocation meeting opened, Master Miaoshu had to have sutures and tetanus shots ready...

So, the Industrial Party had it pretty rough too — as the largest consumer of import quotas, the feeling of being torn at by countless hyenas the moment they got a chance was truly excruciating.

Even so, the Transmigrators' current industrial system was still pathetically weak — it wasn't until three months ago that the Kiln District's first 100% self-produced boiler system was finally declared complete and rolled out.

Yes, after over a year of effort, the Industrial Party members had finally managed to normalize the production of old-style cast iron water pipes, atmospheric valves, rivets, tee fittings, and other such accessories that later generations would consider utterly mundane.

And accompanying the rollout of the first self-produced boiler was the steadily rising "domestication rate" of industrial goods in the Kiln District. Now, although the various equipment self-produced by the Industrial Party was a bit crude, bulky, and rough, non-core components had basically achieved self-sufficiency — this had to be considered a tremendous achievement.

With the foundation now secure, it was time to consider taking a step forward. And no matter which angle you looked at it from, a chemical plant was the most urgently needed new-generation household guardian divine artifact for the Crossing Faction right now.

But as Lu Xun said: eggplants are tasty, but the trees are hard to grow.

For the Transmigrators, a chemical plant's threshold of needing over 90% of its components imported was an indescribable pain. All kinds of towers, kettles, furnaces, and tanks; all kinds of pipes, valves, instruments, and meters; all kinds of compression, separation, and crushing machinery; plus all kinds of chemical glass instruments for testing, measuring, experimenting, and reacting...

In fact, aside from the factory building itself and some bulky, thick glass bottles and rough, heavy bases, the Kiln District could provide nothing — the vast majority of a chemical plant's equipment needed to be imported.

After the situation dragged on until June of this year, the Transmigrators finally compromised. The thirst for the Three Acids and Two Alkalis, sulfonamide, and nitration products ultimately overpowered the fear of import quotas — the Black Stone Gulch Chemical Plant was thus born in agony.

The reason it was agony was that chemistry is a field where once you draw the bow, there's no turning back. If an entire set of equipment was missing even a single specialized acid- and alkali-resistant valve, the whole unit could be paralyzed. Therefore, before the complete equipment list drawn up by the four chemistry specialists, including Hong Xu, had all crossed over to the 17th century, all other material import work had to be suspended — making way for daddy.

Three months — for three whole months, all twelve crates of goods sent by the Cao Emperor were chemical equipment. Even during the war-torn August, the crates were still being opened here at a leisurely pace, causing the vast crowd of anxious onlookers to wail incessantly.

The dark days finally ended with the arrival of September: after three months of intense installation and debugging, the Black Stone Gulch Chemical Plant was finally about to enter the trial production phase.

The place name Black Stone Gulch was coined by the Transmigrators. This valley, tucked away in a remote corner of the Kiln District, originally had no name. It later got this name because all the wall materials for the chemical plant were black basalt.

Relocating the entire chemical industry to Black Stone Gulch was established policy. The location was relatively secluded and downwind, which could prevent collateral damage from various accidents — better safe than sorry; chemical accidents usually came with Poison Cloud Technique and Acid Rain Technique, so keeping some distance was the only way everyone could rest easy.

For this peace of mind, the Infrastructure Department had to grit its teeth and specially build a 3-kilometer high-grade road for Black Stone Gulch.

This was also out of necessity: some chemical agents couldn't tolerate jostling — a jolt would raise the temperature, and a temperature rise would give you a nasty surprise. So although this road was only built to rural road specifications in width, its surface used the high-end material asphalt... History was made inadvertently: the Transmigration Nation's first asphalt road.

Supporting facilities weren't limited to roads — a wastewater treatment plant located between the Kiln District and the chemical zone was also under construction.

The wastewater plant was a project that had been jointly put on the agenda by multiple departments long ago.

Unlike that world where people secretly discharged sewage every day, the Transmigrators living in the 17th century placed exceptional importance on their surrounding environment. The difference in attitude toward wastewater plants between the two worlds boiled down to one core issue: profit.

The reason pollution was rampant in later generations had one unavoidable key point: "competition." Ubiquitous competition brought both social progress and all sorts of extreme behaviors — any enterprise that failed to compress costs to the absolute minimum would go bankrupt.

So factories would secretly discharge pollutants with the tacit approval of the local government. This situation was global: the rabbits' chemical plants did it, and the white-skins' factories likewise stuck their pipes into the Great Lakes, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific Ocean.

The Transmigrators, of course, had no need to do this.

At present, all enterprises in the Kiln District were globally monopolized sole proprietorships with zero competitive pressure, so the cost of pollution discharge wasn't even a consideration. The Kiln District's industrial goods were now produced according to sales quotas, with prices detached from market economics — somewhat like the government-guided pricing of later generations. That bit of cost didn't matter whether it was there or not.

Besides, for these gentlemen, since every blade of grass, every tree, and even every inch of land in this plane would be their own property in the future, why turn the back garden into a garbage dump?... No one spits on their own living room floor.

Thus, riding the east wind of the chemical plant's construction, the long-planned wastewater plant also officially broke ground.

The Kiln District's wastewater plant covered a relatively large area — a full 30 mu... though, come to think of it, land in the 17th century wasn't worth much anyway. Of these 30 mu, only 10 could be developed for now, enough to achieve a daily wastewater treatment capacity of 3–0 tons.

In the future, the wastewater plant would connect the Kiln District's main base and the chemical sub-base. The plant would not only have traditional means of treating conventional wastewater like sedimentation, filtration, agitation, and evaporation, but would also separately open a dedicated micro-electrolysis pool to treat the chemical wastewater discharged from the Black Stone Plant.

The micro-electrolysis reaction relied on the packing material inside the reactor: iron filings and activated carbon granules.

Both packing materials possessed the basic elements required for micro-electrolysis reactions: iron and carbon. The low-potential iron and high-potential carbon formed a potential difference in the wastewater, and the conductive wastewater itself acted as the electrolyte, forming countless primary cells that broke apart the molecular clusters of pollutants and electrolyzed them.

This was a very advanced method of treating wastewater.

Additionally, considering a certain faction's extremely cheap electricity supply, the future wastewater plant might very well directly install electrolysis equipment for wastewater — crude, but effective.

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