Although the researchers only answered Chen Xin with a simple sentence, what behind this sentence means the hard work of many people.
In Jianning, another city in Hunan Province not far from Chen Xin's city, workers are busy debugging a brand new train in the factory.
The meteorite fell from the sky, not only bringing a long night of dust and darkness, but also destroying the original railway power supply lines all over the country, so that the country could only take out the original old coal-fired steam locomotives for reuse, and the original electric locomotives were no longer available. Most of them are lying down.
Although there are still some fuel locomotives that can be used, due to the shortage of fuel, these fuel locomotives that can still move have all been deployed to the most critical places to be responsible for the transportation of the most critical materials.
But in addition, comrades on the railway front have also been thinking of ways to restore railway capacity.
The train they are debugging now is a new train specially researched and developed by Jianning's train manufacturing plant in order to restore railway transportation capacity.
The train carriages are specially designed for thermal insulation, cold protection, frost resistance and wind resistance. While thickening the carriage walls, it also increases the stability of the car body.
According to the original design specifications, this new car needs to cope with Category 10 winds and a low temperature of minus 50 degrees, but now it is clear that this car needs to face more severe challenges.
Workers at the manufacturing plant adjusted and reinforced it, added counterweights to the body, and replaced the insulation material in the compartment wall to ensure that it can still have sufficient insulation effect in an environment of minus 70 degrees Celsius.
Because in addition to being used to transport some valuable materials, this train is also an attempt by the country to resume personnel transportation.
Before the disaster, Jianning was an important train production base in Yanguo. The locomotives produced here were also prominent in Yanguo. Even most of the trains running on Yanguo's important high-speed rail lines were produced here.
Therefore, for the workers of Jianning Train Manufacturing Factory, they are quite rich in both technology and experience.
In fact, before the disaster, they had already developed high-speed rail trains that could still operate normally at low temperatures of more than 40 degrees below zero. Now they are just optimizing the technology.
However, after the disaster, the railway power supply network across the country was destroyed. Electric locomotives lost power and could no longer operate normally. The original advanced electric locomotives were all lying on the ground. Even if they were not damaged by electromagnetic pulses, they could not operate due to lack of power.
After all, the curb weight of an ordinary trunk freight truck is as high as 240 tons, and the traction power reaches 9600KW. Without a strong power supply, it is impossible to move this behemoth.
Therefore, the focus of debugging this new car is actually the power system at the front of the car, not the cabin.
Because power can no longer be supplied through transmission lines, the locomotive must now generate its own power.
This is still very easy to do. Whether it is coal or oil, it can drive a steam turbine to generate electricity, thereby providing enough power for the entire train.
However, this time the new train built by workers at the Jianning Train Manufacturing Factory did not use an internal combustion engine as the power source, but a small nuclear reactor.
This is a nuclear powered locomotive.
The reactor used is Yanguo's own technology, which was originally used on nuclear submarines. However, due to technical limitations, the size has been unable to be reduced, and it cannot be applied to trains and civilian ships.
Moreover, the tonnage of nuclear submarines ranges from a few thousand tons to tens of thousands of tons. The reactor that can drive a nuclear submarine is too powerful for a train. If you want to apply it to a train, in addition to reducing the size, you must further reduce the power. .
However, this is not something that can be done easily. In addition to the nuclear charging part of the reactor itself, the related supporting equipment will occupy a huge space. A cabin is specially designed on the submarine to provide a place for the nuclear reactor. In large-scale You can do this on a warship, but obviously you can't do it on a train. There's not such a big space.
However, Chen Xin’s isotope thermoelectric battery gave scientific researchers a lot of inspiration and technical support, allowing them to successfully miniaturize the original reactor on the nuclear submarine, improve the related technology, and successfully create a reactor that can be installed on a train. small nuclear reactor.
This reactor is not a traditional light water reactor, but a thermoelectric conversion type similar to an isotope thermoelectric battery, which directly converts thermal energy into electrical energy.
There are naturally many benefits to this. The radioactive core can be completely sealed to prevent radiation leakage, because it only needs to conduct heat and convert it into electrical energy. There is no need to inject cooling water into the reactor to boil the water to drive the steam turbine to generate electricity. From energy conversion In terms of efficiency, the former is naturally more efficient.
With such a small nuclear reactor, it is very easy to drive a train. Even a passenger train has a traction power of more than 5600KW.
Because generally small nuclear reactors refer to reactors with an output power of less than 300MW. 1MW is 1000KW. If you want to drive a train, only 10~15MW of power is enough.
The output power of the small reactor currently installed on this new train is 35MW. In addition to driving the train itself, it can also provide abundant electricity to the body for heating, lighting and other electrical needs, including de-icing. and clearing obstacles.
This project had been initiated and researched three months before the meteorite fell, and the manufacturing of the car body also began at that time.
Progress in other parts was very fast. The only limitation was the power system. It was not until Chen Xin provided the isotope thermoelectric battery to the country that the restrictions were lifted, and this new train finally successfully rolled off the production line and is about to be put into operation. It's running.
The first task of this new nuclear-powered train is to transport production equipment to Chen Xin's city.
It is also the special train mentioned in what the scientific researchers told Chen Xin.
Its successful operation not only improves railway transportation conditions and increases transportation capacity, but also marks a more convenient and safer way to apply nuclear power.
The power generation of the small nuclear reactor used on the train was enough to supply the entire electricity consumption of a small county before the disaster. Under the current circumstances, if a city can have a small nuclear reactor, the electricity consumption of the entire city will be No need to worry at all, you can even convert the heating method to electric heating.
The reason why Yanguo did not do this before was because there were too many technical problems that could not be solved, and it was too late to temporarily build a new nuclear power plant, so it did not use this method to power the shelter before the disaster.
But now that safe and reliable small nuclear reactor technology is available, Yanguo's senior officials will obviously not let go of such clean, efficient and convenient energy.
