Extracting deuterium and tritium was not difficult. Seawater contained vast quantities of both elements, and even humanity's current technology could extract them without much trouble, let alone Nie Yun with his Mechanical Insects.
With the oceans' abundant reserves of deuterium and tritium, and fusion producing completely nonpolluting helium, nuclear fusion was considered a major energy technology for Earth's future development!
However, nuclear fusion required temperatures exceeding a hundred million degrees in an instant, along with unimaginably high pressures. Even the most advanced technology currently available could not achieve this under normal conditions.
The only nuclear weapon built on the principle of nuclear fusion-the hydrogen bomb-first used a fission reaction to create the high-temperature, high-pressure environment needed to trigger fusion. This was the so-called atomic bomb detonator.
Yet while detonating a hydrogen bomb was easy, sustaining a fusion reaction under controlled conditions to supply energy was anything but simple.
Nearly all the world's major nuclear powers were researching stable nuclear fusion. The technology involved cutting-edge advances in almost every fundamental discipline, including physics, materials science, mechanics, and engineering, and had brought together some of the finest minds. Even so, its technological barriers remained firmly planted in the path of human progress.
Deuterium-tritium nuclear fusion had two main technological hurdles: creating a stable environment of high temperature and pressure, and containing the ultrahot plasma produced during fusion.
But after absorbing a wealth of fundamental physics knowledge, Nie Yun, with his Mechanical Insects at his disposal, finally came up with an outrageously bold idea.
At midnight that night, after the total mass of Mechanical Insects officially surpassed ten thousand tonnes, Nie Yun boarded the Sea Wolf with all of them and arrived at the designated experimental site, several hundred nautical miles from his base.
It was a tiny rocky islet well away from