Unfortunately, holding the copper doped fluorite with copper plates didn't actually help that much. While things were less energetic, the container still failed, and the copper itself showed clear signs of degradation. It was as if the surface had been sprayed with a fine mist of acid. The plates themselves stayed intact thankfully, though I did end up getting minor injuries on my hands from hauling the plates up to the surface. So I've taken to using stone shaped tongs to pick them up and move them.

Which basically means I'm stuck submerging the crystals in water. I have a few thoughts on how I should proceed with the next experiments, since there are some risks involved that I was unaware of previously. If I had used salt water, for instance, the water would probably become much more acidic, due to the presence of dissociated chlorine. The water I was using was probably becoming acidic due to the extra protons present, but at a certain point, the conductivity of the surrounding water and tank would promote the production of diatomic hydrogen over free protons.

That also means, however, that I can't just expose metals inside the water to increase the conductivity, as any metals that we have access to are going to be rapidly destroyed by acid. So instead, I'm going to need to get creative. There are a few options available, and I think a combination of them is probably the best bet moving forward. First, I should have the vat of water be fairly large in size as compared to the amount of hydrogen output I expect. This will hopefully distribute the electrical burden across a larger volume, and make the concentration of acid lower at the edges of the container.

Second, while the inside of the chamber should be covered in an acid resistant material, like quartz, just under that surface, I'd like to have copper plating with grounding wires buried into the ground. Additionally, I want to install a fairly robust lightning rod nearby. This production of hydrogen is going to cause a buildup of positive charge, which is likely to attract lightning strikes. Having lightning striking nearby a bunch of contained hydrogen gas is very hazardous, so I want to make sure there are safe ways for that charge to be handled.

Third, the hydrogen is going to be produced in water, the resultant gas mixture is going to be wet hydrogen, with water vapor mixed in, so I'll need a drying process like I used before. For this facility, I want to have a few batch freezers available to freeze the water out of the air. I think that having the facility dug under the ground, rather than on the surface, will help reduce risk.

At the deepest point in the facility is where I want to produce the hydrogen. There is a tradeoff with lower ambient mana underground, but I don't think I'll build too deep that it'll be that much of a concern. Above the production area, I want four valves that each go to pressure tank freezers. While any particular freezer is in use, the others can be cleaned or maintained. Then, those freezers will empty into a much larger tank for keeping dried hydrogen with it's top being just a few feet under ground.

All these tanks will have spring powered emergency release valves going to a flare stack, with one way pinhole fittings along the way to prevent accidental blowback. Though I'll need to do a bit of careful piping to keep a pilot light burning in the flare. The part of the facility that is above ground will contain the valves and fixtures for draining the large tank into other containers to charge them with pressurized hydrogen.

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I actually was able to get some help from the construction teams that are building our wall to dig out the areas underground for the hydrogen facility. It's just easier for them to get the stone here than it is to haul it from other locations, so they were more than willing to help out.

All in all, we dug out an area 40 feet by 40 feet at the top, which tapered off in three 20 foot tall layers. The next layer down was 30x30, and the layer under that was 20x20. Part of the purpose of putting the hydrogen production area so far underground is to reduce the surface charge difference, and hopefully allow strategically placed lightning rods to reduce the likelihood of actual damage occurring.

Digging the area out, with the help of the construction teams only took fifteen days, though using stone shaping to install copper grounding cables into the walls ended up taking another ten days. I installed a total of thirteen thick cables each proceeding out in a straight line positioned in a descending spiral to reduce overlap as much as possible. Each cable goes forty feet outward, and then I used stone shaping to fill the hole in tight around the copper cable again.

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While the construction teams were digging the area out, I did some additional testing, to make sure that what I had planned would work. I ran a few tests using lightstone in place of the eventual quartz for the hydrogen production chamber, and found that the lightstone was fairly resistant to the acids involved, but some of the impurities were slowly being eaten away, causing the lightstone to become brittle. However, if I then used the remaining stone and shaped it again, that problem was essentially solved.

So, rather than attempt to build the chamber out of pure quartz, I figured I could acid wash existing lightstone, then reform it to make the new chamber. Since the process is somewhat slow, I set up a container on the surface with a small piece of the copper fluorite submerged in water, and then put pulverized lightstone into the tub to be acid washed.

I'd made enough of the acid washed lightstone by the time I went to go install cables that I was able to coat the inside of the acid wash chamber with it, so that I could be a little more negligent with it while I went to work on the rest of the facility. After this facility is done, I might want to consider doing some material testing on other things in this acid water.

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The lowest level took me twenty-five days to finish building, and an additional six days to fine tune some of the emergency relief valves. The hydrogen generation chamber sits in the middle of the room, with very thick walls, and cables reaching in from the outer walls onto the surfaces. The inside of the chamber is coated in the acid washed lightstone, which, in the time I spent building this chamber, had barely reacted at all in the other container on the surface.

Maintenance of this chamber will require stone shaping to open a hole to enter through every half a year or so. There are four main outlet tubes, two safety relief valves, a bypass to flare line, and a purposeful weak point meant to fail before the rest of the chamber does, in case the other safety devices fail to work.

On the floor above that sits the four freezer chambers where the four tubes on the previous level go to. Each one has it's own stirling cooler that I took ten days designing. Unlike a lot of the other coolers I've made in the past, these ones have a very long and straight layout, such that their hot end heat exchanger reaches all the way to the surface.

Building out the rest of the freezer floor took an additional thirty-three days. This floor was more difficult, because I had to design these chambers to be able to be thawed out and drained. So the gas inlet actually enters higher up in the chamber, and liquid draining valves had to be installed that were also airtight to prevent gas leakage. Ultimately, the way I've implemented this relies on a small quartz viewing window to allow a small amount of water to be left at the bottom of the drainage valve, so that the water, and later the ice, form a solid seal, preventing gas escape through the valve.

The third floor, and last below ground floor, simply consists of a fairly large pressure tank, with a few outlet pipes going up to the surface where the hydrogen can be collected from. This floor took another ten days to make. As with all the prior levels, multiple safety valves are installed to prevent accidents. Each chamber is equipped with two manometers to measure pressure, along with a warning label of what I consider safe vs unsafe.

Then, on the surface, a single story building is built over the prior floor, with access down to the lower levels. One side of this building also houses the second largest size stirling engine powered by fluorite, which is used to drive the freezer coolers. Rather than build the lightning rods here, where it would still be very dangerous to get a spark, I instead went out about thirty feet in each cardinal direction from the building, and installed 30 foot tall obelisks with a thick copper cable running down the center of each and into the ground about ten feet to a wide metal plate. Building out everything on the surface took another forty-two days.

Of all the buildings I've built, this one definitely seems to give off the most evil scientist vibes. The four freezer heat rejection ends make the outside of the building shimmer with rising hot air when they're running, and the obelisks on the outside make it seem like I'm doing some kind of ritual. From the outside, it probably does really seem like that. We're even getting a magic invisible flammable gas from it. I'd definitely be suspicious if I didn't know better.

I think I'm sympathizing with mad scientists over this. I can imagine myself yelling at someone during a thunderstorm, "Whatever you do, don't smash the obelisks, everything would explode!" Then the heroes smash the obelisks, and in a true rpg game fashion, lightning strikes, and the whole facility explodes taking me with it. Perhaps the mad scientists in stories aren't as mad as they seem...