Chapter 654 - 638: New Fuel

And just as Flight N755C1 took off, another aircraft of equal importance landed in the Capital.

A group of foreigners with various hair colors descended from the plane, hurried on their feet, and quickly left by car.

They were from UK’s Vodafone, Sweden’s Ericsson, and France’s telecommunications giant Alcatel.

Zhang Siren, now the official director of the Science and Technology Committee, personally came to greet them, joined by important figures from Huawei, University Information Communication, and the telecommunications sector.

This time, they would decide the success or failure of two matters, the acquisition of Vodafone’s Italy branch, and the development of a new generation high-speed communication protocol with Alcatel and Ericsson.

The former was the first step for domestic telecom operators trying to enter Europe, while the latter was to further promote the Ternary System.

The relationship between the two was closely knit, and the main breakthrough lay in Yellow River Semiconductor and Modu Microelectronics’ joint push to develop a new generation of 28nm silicon carbide chip production lines, and their assault toward the 20nm and 14nm processes.

In the chip industry over these two years, silicon carbide and the Ternary System had become hot keywords.

Although, up to now, ternary intelligence devices made up less than 3% of the domestic market share, industry insiders had clearly recognized their enormous potential and the country’s unwavering determination.

Furthermore, with Yellow River Semiconductor registering patents like mad, companies around the world were battling for a position in the market.

Qualcomm had even released its first-generation ternary chip, intended as a co-processor in smartphones to provide AI computing capabilities. Although it was not yet on the market, it had proven the recognition by established manufacturers.

Since the Ternary System may well be a match for the binary system in the future, it was necessary to layout the ecosystem in advance. Using this as bait, the Science and Technology Committee attracted the three telecom giants in the hope of breaking into the global market.

Zhang Siren sat in the new Xin’an business vehicle’s backseat when he suddenly saw an MPV speeding past outside the window.

The MPV, obviously a cheap model, had several conspicuous protrusions around its roof that looked out of place. Yet, what drew the most attention was the empty driver’s seat.

This was a new autonomous-electric vehicle from Xin’an, put into operation after New Year’s Day, licensed specifically to operate near several airports and stations in Beijing. Its fare was the same as a taxi, but with many discounts, it wasn’t intended to turn a profit just yet.

Due to changes in the world line, the newly released autonomous driving classification system was even more stringent than in the original timeline. L3 was considered a fully autonomous driving level, able to participate in traffic without any need for driver intervention.

Xin’an was the only domestic enterprise that had produced cars certified with L3. However, for the sake of precaution, they first started with unmanned taxis for trial operations. These test vehicles would gradually increase the difficulty of the testing environment and, after thoroughly confirming the reliability of autonomous driving, would introduce market-sales models.

This was also to give Xin’an time to reduce related technology costs. The investment in L3 technology was still too high, especially relying on domestically produced 14nm process chips, which were not available elsewhere.

However, time was plentiful. Relevant legislation was still being supplemented and debated, and domestically, there was a lot of controversy about L3 autonomous vehicles. The main issue was how much responsibility automakers should bear in traffic accidents.

Taking no responsibility at all was impossible, but assuming full responsibility seemed unfair. Even if full responsibility was taken, there were still problems with how to determine the liability.

Let’s suppose an autonomous vehicle made a wrongful judgment and killed someone. If the company was fully liable, the victim’s compensation was a certainty, but who would bear the criminal responsibility?

The AI couldn’t be imprisoned, and the car owner wasn’t responsible. It hardly seemed appropriate for the company to blame one or two members of the management or technical staff, and it was even less conceivable to arrest everyone involved.

But if it was just a case of paying compensation for a fatal accident caused by subjective error, wouldn’t that indicate a huge loophole in the law and a crisis of trust in autonomous driving?

In the long run, AI could not possibly remain forever reliable and has never been out of the country, making this problem extremely tricky to solve. According to Zhang Siren’s guess, there wouldn’t be any solution within two or three years.

Before that, car companies could only aggressively roll out on L2 level, or even hard register L3 level autonomous driving as "L2++++," shifting the risk to the users.

By then, some L2 could only obediently assist driving, while others could help you weave through traffic on Beijing’s second ring road during peak hours without a scratch, making the regulations seem vague.

Thinking about the many challenges ahead, Zhang Siren felt an immense headache.

The only consolation was that these problems were "rich people’s problems," which he once could not even hope for.

...

Hefei.

Ai Quan and others had been with the EAST Team for about two months, and both teams got along very well.

Those who developed the big mushroom were naturally also experts in controlled fusion technology; even if they couldn’t lead, they were competent supports and very helpful to the research.

Similarly, nuclear scientists working on peaceful technology, after absorbing the design principles of related weapons, grew rapidly and mastered them without feeling strange, sparking many valuable ideas.

During this time, what both groups did the most was actually research controlled nuclear fusion, to be precise, hoping to improve the conversion rate by delving deeper into the fusion mechanism.

Mainstream hydrogen bomb design used deuterium-tritium fusion with a reaction conversion rate of only 0.7%, with a very small portion of matter involved in the reaction.

If that number could be raised to 7%, then the mass of a megaton-scale hydrogen bomb would drop dramatically to around ten kilograms, roughly the size of a suitcase.

However, no one dared to hope that a two-hundred-megaton super nuclear bomb could achieve this level. A group of scientists boldly speculated and, after considering several nuclear configurations, set a preliminary target of 2% to 3%. But in reality, exceeding 1% would already be considered an epoch-making breakthrough in the field of nuclear weapons.

So far, both teams had made no actual progress and had only proposed several novel theoretical proposals, but at a glance, it was clear that the potential was limited:

Because most of the proposals had been tested once over the last century, and both the good and bad outcomes were roughly known.

Yu Min, however, had been biding his time, waiting for the right moment, which he believed was testing.

Today, they had just received a new task: to discuss and research the lunar hydrogen bomb test plan and to try to gain inspiration for a new hydrogen bomb configuration from it.

Why draw inspiration from an old UK hydrogen bomb? Is it just because it is special due to exploding on the Moon?

Of course not, because exploding hydrogen bombs in a vacuum had already been done, and experts were not likely to be surprised by the general outcome of a nuclear explosion on the Moon; otherwise, all those nuclear tests in the last century would have been for nothing.

The special aspect lies in the Moon’s unique product: helium-3.

As the ideal third-generation fuel for controlled nuclear fusion, it emits no protons during fusion, has an astonishingly high reaction rate, with a theoretical limit of 70%!

This is almost 100 times that of deuterium-tritium fusion, and obviously the most accessible breakthrough.