Year of Fusion

When the first commercial controllable nuclear fusion power station came to light in the Gobi Desert, some people saw unlimited energy, while others saw the extinguishing of the last miner's lamp. In 2035, the domestically produced "Eastern Ring" Tokamak achieved steady-state connection to the grid, electricity prices fell below three cents, and a "post-scarcity era" suddenly arrived. Chen Yan, a plasma physicist who returned from studying in Europe, lit the artificial sun with his own hands, but on the same day he learned that the coal mine his father had guarded for thirty years was permanently closed. Father Chen Tieshan, the last underground worker, guards the abandoned mining history museum with his prosthetic leg. He didn't know anything about Q values ​​and magnetic cages. He only knew one thing - back then, the miner's lamp illuminated not the lanes, but the rice bowls of hundreds of families. Chen Yan will soon discover that fusion has not ended the fight, but has only moved the battlefield from the underground to the sky: some have appropriated "infinite energy" to build a private space empire, some have tried to make the reactor a "controllable disaster" in a slow meltdown, and others have reminded him: when the cage is opened, what is released may not necessarily be light. When the plasma burned to 150 million degrees in the magnetic cage, between the ruins and the stars, two generations of father and son finally understood the same problem: the weight of a powerful weapon is never just its tonnage, but also the weight it places on people's shoulders when they bend over.