Chapter 487 - 478 Application 639_1

"The Island Country’s cabinet held an emergency meeting about Edo Electric Power Company’s wastewater treatment"

"Edo Electric Power Company announced that its wastewater treatment capacity had reached its limit, and it was difficult to bear the enormous maintenance costs of the storage tanks"

"Nakayama Juji stated that he would take the wastewater discharge issue seriously."

On August 10, the department responsible for handling nuclear power station waste at Edo Electric Power Company held a press conference. A manager, in front of the reporters, took out a glass of preliminarily purified nuclear wastewater and drank it without hesitation.

This was to respond to the external questionings about the nuclear wastewater treatment measures, but the effect was not as good as expected. Instead, after the report was released, it provoked widespread ridicule.

An increasingly educated public knows that radiation damage to the human body is slow, and unless exposed to a huge amount of radiation in a short period, this bit of wastewater couldn’t prove anything—the effects might not manifest until years later.

However, Edo Electric Power Company believed in its own performance and still insisted that preliminary purification was sufficient to reduce it to harmless standards.

In recent days, all East Asian countries with coastlines have been protesting vehemently, unanimously opposing the discharge of nuclear wastewater into the sea—even after purification.

...

Capital.

Under the leadership of the Aerospace Development Committee, the nation’s top geologists and mining experts were organized to start analyzing the results from the Skylight II exploration.

Skylight II mission arrived on the Moon on August 2, landed on August 3, completed its exploration and returned to lunar orbit on August 6 to dock with the Black Rabbit Space Station. The astronauts there spent three days organizing data to be sent back.

The most important data was from the blasting experiment. This was the first time humanity conducted such a test. Deng Lei and Li Wei chose two most characteristic sites and carried out 10-meter deep blasting operations, creating a large hole at each site.

The on-site photos and the data measured by the instruments were very complete, providing exceedingly valuable original material, a treasure trove for interested experts.

Even though it was still far from the ore-rich areas, it was already enough to deduce many things.

But for Lin Ju, the results of the preliminary analysis were less than ideal.

He went directly to Academician She. The other high-level officials from the space agency were out of the country on a visit with their superiors, not expected to return for a month.

"Sir She, I think there is a problem with the initial progressive blasting proposal."

Academician She seemed unsurprised by this, as progressive layered blasting was only an initial conception, and it was normal to have flaws.

The environment on the Moon is completely different from that of Earth, and the Aerospace Development Committee had long been prepared to face various challenges.

"I haven’t really looked at the report yet, what’s the situation?"

Lin Ju sat down and separated out the valuable parts, saying gravely:

"This time we conducted a blasting test on the Moon Soil layer. The explosive power has penetrated through tens of meters of Moon Soil to the fractured rock zone below, which is over a thousand meters thick. That is to say, the distance between us and the ore veins is mostly made up of this fractured rock zone.

According to the data from the detection instruments, this layer is formed mainly by the accumulation of a variety of meteorites that have impacted the Moon, containing many metal components with a high individual density, which will seriously weaken the power of the blasts."

Even though the explosives used this time had many improvements, the effect was only one-third of what was expected, and there was a serious problem: the debris and moon soil produced by the sequential blasting were too difficult to clean up, as we can’t deploy hundreds of pieces of construction machinery as we would on Earth.

"We initially estimated the mining pit’s blasting work would take half a year to complete, but now this number has to be multiplied by three."

Although Academician She was mentally prepared, the result still gave him a headache. He picked up the documents and after reviewing them for a while, he realized the situation might be even worse.

Previously, many people believed that the Moon’s low gravity was a big advantage, but now, through testing, it seems that at best, there’s a slight positive effect, and in practical terms, operating there is more troublesome than on Earth.

He was not an expert in this field, so he simply rubbed the top of his head and said,

"We have to trust our expert talents. We still have half a year to figure out a solution, and we will definitely solve the problem.

Besides chemical blasting, there are still plenty of methods. However... what worries me more is the cost. According to this report, the cost is far from being reduced to the level we hoped for, and our estimated profit margins were all based on this. If we can’t make money, it’s hard to sustain operations."

Lin Ju nodded in agreement. Based on a mining pit depth of 1,400 meters and a bottom diameter of 300 meters, the diameter of the top layer of the mining pit would need to be over 2,500 meters, requiring the displacement of about 9 billion tons of material, which is about one ten-billionth of the Moon’s total mass.

Only after blasting away these 9 billion tons of material could we reach the ore layer to begin mining, which begs the question of how much rare earth needs to be excavated to recover the costs.

Seeing that Lin Ju had no intention of leaving, Academician She knew he must have an idea and naturally asked,

"You didn’t come here just to complain, did you? Does New Yuan have any new ideas?"

Lin Ju hesitated for a moment before finally speaking up boldly,

"Sir She, do you think we could apply for a few ten-megaton hydrogen bombs?"

Academician She: "..."

Nuclear bombing for mining—actually, the base had entertained this idea long ago, but had kept it secret, waiting for specific data from Skylight II before proposing it.

During the earlier discussions of the base’s metallurgical plan, the leadership had already crunched the numbers and concluded that mining using traditional methods would be a terrifyingly expensive mega-project with a completely disproportionate input-output ratio, so naturally, the idea of using nuclear explosions to replace conventional blasting came up.

And the base was no stranger to nuclear bombs.

Traditional atom bombs have relatively simple technology, and Qingshan Base was entirely capable of constructing them. Cheng Nankai easily produced simulated explosion models of atomic bombs and used supercomputers to calculate the effects of the blasts.

Although he didn’t understand hydrogen bombs, Ye Changsi did. He was a core member involved in the whole process of developing the first hydrogen bomb. Although he still kept the secrets of the hydrogen bomb to himself, he also calculated the explosive power of different yield hydrogen bombs.

In the end, the base’s research concluded that if atomic bombs were used, it would take about 200 to 250 medium-to-large atomic bombs with yields of 150,000 to 200,000 tons each; if hydrogen bombs were used, the optimal model would be 10 to 12 megaton hydrogen bombs with yields of over 15 million tons each, or 50 hydrogen bombs with yields of 3 to 5 million tons each.

Cheng Nankai calculated the cost of using atomic bombs to be 750 million to 1 billion yuan, which was an estimate based on the cost of production by the base itself, with each bomb costing about 3 to 5 million yuan.

Ye Changsi had the authority to speak on hydrogen bombs, and he believed that third-generation hydrogen bombs, which are highly utilized in military applications and had extremely expensive triggering devices, were unsuitable due to their small size. Moreover, first-generation hydrogen bombs were too large and wasted materials, so the most suitable were second-generation hydrogen bombs, which use a small atom bomb as a trigger for a medium-sized hydrogen bomb.

If a 15-million-ton bomb would cost around 20 million per unit, and the 3 or 5-million-ton bombs cost about 10 million each, the total expense would only be a few billion yuan.