The Next Boom

After the exercise in the Pacific Ocean was quietly canceled, things on the United States side calmed down considerably as well.

At the very least, the White House was no longer in a hurry to arrange another exercise.

However, the Central Intelligence Agency's requests to access files on the people responsible for related Huaxia projects became far more frequent than before.

Of course, few people paid much attention to such matters. During the Spring Festival of the Renzi year, the world's attention was already focused on Beijing—or rather, on the Changping Sunfire Demonstration Power Station.

A colossal power station had suddenly appeared without anyone being prepared for it.

It was hard to believe that it could simply keep operating indefinitely.

So everyone wondered whether, one day, the target pellets might suddenly stop being supplied. Would the equipment fail to withstand long-term neutron bombardment? Which link in the chain would break down first? No one could say for sure.

Thus, countries around the world watched Sunfire's status every day.

For those nations that had already arranged their interests for the coming decades around coal and oil, they were actually all hoping that something would go wrong with Sunfire. Ideally, they would wake up tomorrow to find that the station had already shut down.

However, the first week passed.

Sunfire's generating output remained steady at 300,000 kilowatts.

The stock prices of several oil companies on Wall Street fell slightly on Tuesday, then climbed back up on Wednesday.

The energy sector of the S&P 500 only dropped by a little over one percent over the week.

In the second week, Sunfire's 500-kilovolt transmission line approached Beijing's main grid.

Fusion power was transmitted into Beijing's urban core for the first time.

Generating output also rose from 300,000 kilowatts to 600,000 kilowatts.

That week, Brent