The Technical Approach Was Clear!

Inside the director's office at the Institute for Advanced Study.

As Yang Xu pushed the door open and walked in, Lu Zhou set down his pen and gave him a questioning look.

"Are the analysis results out?"

Yang Xu took a USB drive from his pocket and placed it on Lu Zhou's desk. "All the files are in here."

Lu Zhou continued, "What about the originals?"

Yang Xu said, "They've already been backed up to the database... Is something wrong?"

Lu Zhou said, "Destroy them."

Yang Xu paused in surprise, but he did not ask why. He simply nodded.

"All right."

Watching the office door close again, Lu Zhou plugged the USB drive into his laptop, opened the folder, and began carefully examining the images one by one.

After leaving the underground laboratory the previous morning, he had taken several fragments from the curved, double-layered structure between the fuel tank and the heat exchanger to Yang Xu for infrared spectral peak analysis and transmission electron microscope imaging.

Judging by the images, his suspicions had indeed been confirmed.

Although the shattered nanoceramic composite had become brittle, making its original structural properties difficult to deduce, the carbon residue inside it was enough to establish that it was some kind of heat-resistant composite with anisotropic thermal conductivity.

In particular, transmission electron microscope observations of samples taken from the inner layer clearly revealed residual hydrogen in the structural defects of several samples.

As far as Lu Zhou knew, there were most likely only two circumstances that could produce such a result.

One possibility was that the hydrogen had formed from the decay of neutrons that penetrated the material.

The other was that high-energy proton beams had pierced the inner wall directly, leaving hydrogen trapped inside the material.

Given that both the hydrogen and the