It's very easy to automate them with GregTech Translocators. Set one to input depleted cells, and another one to pull re-enriched cells out. If your reactor is full, the cells will always go in the right spot. If you want to automatically replace the uranium cell as well, use an advanced buffer or an advanced regulator to put all the cells in. You could do similar with RP filters, but you'd need a clock, and you can't replace the uranium cell as easily.
More efficient/completely safe nuclear reactor setups?
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Whoa, 400? Best I've seen is around 100. (My own design, recharges 104 isotope cells per uranium cell: link.)
I am trying to see just how much energy you can get out of a single piece of uranium. We know that uranium and thorium cells produce 1M EU * reactor efficiency, plutonium cells 4M EU * efficiency. Ignoring efficiency for a while (let's assume you can run an eff7 reactor and automate its cooling), this is what I got:
1 uranium --> uranium ingot --> 1 uranium cell = 1M EU * efficiency
16 uranium --> 16 uranium dust --> centrifuge into 16 uranium, 1 plutonium, and 4 thorium cells --> 24M EU/eff, that is 1.5MEU/eff per uranium
1 uranium --> uranium ingot --> 8 depleted cells --> centrifuge into 4 thorium cells = 4M EU/eff
1 uranium --> uranium ingot --> 8 depleted cells --> 8 uranium cells (8/104 = 0.077 uranium cells used to enrich) = 7.923M EU/eff
1 uranium --> 8 depleted cells --> 8 re-enriched cells (0.077 uranium cells used) --> centrifuge into 3 delpleted, 1 plutonium and 4 thorium cells. Doing a series sum to account for re-enriching the new depleted cells yields (trust me on this, I can provide the math) 11.8144 EU/eff per unit of uranium.
Assuming an eff7 reactor, and neglecting centrifuge EU costs and cost of copper and tin, the last choice gives 82.7M EU for each unit of uranium. Quite an improvement over the 1M from just canning it and tossing it in a nuker.
Turning uranium into plutonium with UU-matter requires 16,666,667 EU, but yields an extra 3M EU/eff. Therefore it is worth it if your reactor's efficiency is at least 5.55.
(If you are cheating and using IC2 massfab with GregTech, the conversion is *always* worth doing, no matter your reactor's efficiency.)
I have no idea how breeding cells with thorium or plutonium works. The GT wiki doesn't say anything about it, and the planner shows the same results for both as for uranium. If anyone can fill me in on the mechanics, I can take that into account as well.
Nice job on the math. One issue with plutonium tho. cooling is always a major headache for running it efficiently. using the thorium surplus to breed more uranium is easy tho, but the efficiency hit is rather large unless you go all out on maximizing the amount of breed fuel per breeding cycle. that means automating a high gain breeder and all the complexity that entails... but the fuel gain is truly awesome I have to admit.. making it very tempting to do... too bad getting an eff7 PU reactor is almost impossible to do without wasting lapis and redstone en masse.
Do you need 100% uptime for your PU reactor? If not, use the design floating around somewhere, which gives you a lower uptime, and automate the on/off via two chained state cells.
That is what I generally do. I try to balance it so that it has a cooldown that the same as the runtime... that way you can control it with a simple timer-> flip flop combo.
I really struggle more with efficient breeding cycles tho.... I really never do need all that much fuel tbh.
One easy way to manage a breeder with some manual input is to fill up all the slots in the reactor.
Have a filter or railcraft loader pull out re-enriched cells, and then to stop the uranium have a pipe anywhere next to the reactor and use a buildcraft gate set to emit redstone when inventory is full. Reactor will then charge cells -- once they finish the filter will pull them out and the reactor will shut off.
You could use filters or any input mechanism to load in more cells to charge or just next time you are in the area put in new cells if you don't want to fully automate.
Have a filter or railcraft loader pull out re-enriched cells, and then to stop the uranium have a pipe anywhere next to the reactor and use a buildcraft gate set to emit redstone when inventory is full. Reactor will then charge cells -- once they finish the filter will pull them out and the reactor will shut off.
You could use filters or any input mechanism to load in more cells to charge or just next time you are in the area put in new cells if you don't want to fully automate.
Just a thought about automation of the breeder:
State cell connected to the breeder, time set exactly to the time needed to recharge one batch of cells. First start on the press of a button. When the state cell finishes, use the continuation-pulse to activate a filter pulling the 4 cells. A hopper filled with 4 depleted isotope cells will re-fill all slots. Some ticks later (depending on how fast the hopper is, use a repeater as a delay), let the signal route back to the input of the state cell to restart the cycle. At that moment another filter pulls 4 new cells from storage into the hopper.
Possibly you'll need a pulse-former in front of the state cell, I'm not 100% sure when the timer starts ticking (on low->high or on high->low transition of the input).
To make this cycle stopable, connect an AND-cell with output to state cell input and input 1 = lever, input 2 = button OR cycled signal.
Should this work?
State cell connected to the breeder, time set exactly to the time needed to recharge one batch of cells. First start on the press of a button. When the state cell finishes, use the continuation-pulse to activate a filter pulling the 4 cells. A hopper filled with 4 depleted isotope cells will re-fill all slots. Some ticks later (depending on how fast the hopper is, use a repeater as a delay), let the signal route back to the input of the state cell to restart the cycle. At that moment another filter pulls 4 new cells from storage into the hopper.
Possibly you'll need a pulse-former in front of the state cell, I'm not 100% sure when the timer starts ticking (on low->high or on high->low transition of the input).
To make this cycle stopable, connect an AND-cell with output to state cell input and input 1 = lever, input 2 = button OR cycled signal.
Should this work?
Whoa, 400? Best I've seen is around 100. (My own design, recharges 104 isotope cells per uranium cell: link.)
I am trying to see just how much energy you can get out of a single piece of uranium. We know that uranium and thorium cells produce 1M EU * reactor efficiency, plutonium cells 4M EU * efficiency. Ignoring efficiency for a while (let's assume you can run an eff7 reactor and automate its cooling), this is what I got:
1 uranium --> uranium ingot --> 1 uranium cell = 1M EU * efficiency
16 uranium --> 16 uranium dust --> centrifuge into 16 uranium, 1 plutonium, and 4 thorium cells --> 24M EU/eff, that is 1.5MEU/eff per uranium
1 uranium --> uranium ingot --> 8 depleted cells --> centrifuge into 4 thorium cells = 4M EU/eff
1 uranium --> uranium ingot --> 8 depleted cells --> 8 uranium cells (8/104 = 0.077 uranium cells used to enrich) = 7.923M EU/eff
1 uranium --> 8 depleted cells --> 8 re-enriched cells (0.077 uranium cells used) --> centrifuge into 3 delpleted, 1 plutonium and 4 thorium cells. Doing a series sum to account for re-enriching the new depleted cells yields (trust me on this, I can provide the math) 11.8144 EU/eff per unit of uranium.
Assuming an eff7 reactor, and neglecting centrifuge EU costs and cost of copper and tin, the last choice gives 82.7M EU for each unit of uranium. Quite an improvement over the 1M from just canning it and tossing it in a nuker.
Turning uranium into plutonium with UU-matter requires 16,666,667 EU, but yields an extra 3M EU/eff. Therefore it is worth it if your reactor's efficiency is at least 5.55.
(If you are cheating and using IC2 massfab with GregTech, the conversion is *always* worth doing, no matter your reactor's efficiency.)
I have no idea how breeding cells with thorium or plutonium works. The GT wiki doesn't say anything about it, and the planner shows the same results for both as for uranium. If anyone can fill me in on the mechanics, I can take that into account as well.
Nice math. I was doing some similar math to see the payoff time for hybrid solar panels. I got about 40 hours worst case using an eff 3 reactor and only counting the uranium once. Squeezing every inch out of the fuel pushes the payoff to over 150 hours. Your final path looks like it would push my payoff calculation 200+ hours.
Does all your math above count in the chance to get cells back? Like you start with 8 uranium ingots -> make 64 depleted -> re-enrich -> run 64 -> get back 16 -> re-enrich -> etc... On average looks to net about 32% more cells through recycled fuel.
This is my first go around with gregtech - do plutonium and thorium cells have the same 25% chance to give a depleted uranium cells back when they are used up? To me this is the main issue with nuclear -- eventually you will use up your fuel. At a certain point i don't want to go mining anymore. I just want to build or do other things, but i don't want to worry about fuel.
Other than bees for uranium it looks like thorium through coal dust (blaze rods) is the most accessible renewable nuclear fuel. Anyone have others?
It could run into issues when the chunk is unloaded, or on server restart. I don't know how well the various timers cope with either - that's why I prefer systems based solely on reading the reactor's contents.
Nope, it doesn't. The simple case of a uranium breeder + reactor, starting with 8 depleted cells and re-enriching whatever is left after fuel cells are used up, yields on average 10.53 EU/eff per piece of uranium. Note that you'll need quite a lot of uranium to get to the average, as you have to always enrich 4 cells at a time. I don't know whether P or T cells give depleted ones back, that would boost the efficiency of the last setup even more. (100M EU per uranium? Possibly. Off to mine copper for 4 nukers.)
I just realized another ommision: the breeder posted above actually also produces EU, at the rate of an efficiency 1 reactor from the uranium/thorium used to re-enrich cells. Therefore for every 4 cells you breed, you will get an extra 1M EU. (Don't confuse this with the EU/eff ratio, as this number doesn't scale with the efficiency of your power generating reactors.)
Eff 5 thorium reactor http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.blueyo...5rxxg0hfeb0q5t1xmoclrhybr8783oapeo2eg6s8t0jk0
80 EU/t
80 million EU total
Cost per run: 96 copper and 16 thorium cells
80 EU/t
80 million EU total
Cost per run: 96 copper and 16 thorium cells
here is a cheaper version of that design: http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.blueyo...1y59turzbot6klmgssqdbs5wuibm63ojco7pztjw4q1vk
here is a very nice design i came across. i found that 2 quad thorium cells adjacent to each other, could be cooled with 2 op heat vents on each cell. lots of potential designs here but this one was my favorite:
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.blueyo...3h50i6hy94im37t5y9zythi4wtjxqmpg0uk08gv97jim8
Well, i've stumbled upon an ingenious idea for getting truly incredible eu/t from a nuclear setup - up to 5440eu/t! You should check this thread out to see how. Its a bit hard to explain but i'll try; you use coolant cells to keep the reactor cool. Then, when the cells are almost depleted, you pump out the old cells and insert new ones. Meanwhile the almost-dead cells are pumped into cooling towers - essentially just empty reactors designed to do nothing except cool the cells down. When the cells are completely cool, they are pumped into an RP2 block/machine (sorry can't remember which one, hardly touched RP yet), where they will sit until they need to be pumped into the reactor again. With enough cooling towers, you can do all of this without even switching the reactor off.
If you read all of that and have no idea what i'm on about, just click the link
If you read all of that and have no idea what i'm on about, just click the link
The problem with fully automating reactors is that they are prone to misbehaving during lag spikes and server restarts/crashes. As said, the best designs are the ones that monitor the reactor itself, not just time, but those are also more expensive and hard to automate
I took peppe's design and added just 1 thorium cell and it gave it slightly less EU per tic, but 4 time more EU. Is this possiple? i'm still new to reactors.
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.blueyo...i85a7okmm46eaf4zv3x51aszmyq5pnh4hx29ngf99ylts
Also heres a design from Dayvidplays that is a little expensive on copper but produces more EU and less quad cores than most designs i've seen
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.blueyo...b39v6guyzcoupacgylfzyvr2osc5uhg09n5hsdrdw5yww
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.blueyo...i85a7okmm46eaf4zv3x51aszmyq5pnh4hx29ngf99ylts
Also heres a design from Dayvidplays that is a little expensive on copper but produces more EU and less quad cores than most designs i've seen
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.blueyo...b39v6guyzcoupacgylfzyvr2osc5uhg09n5hsdrdw5yww
No reason for the reactor platings or the cooling cells except one great thing. This can be 100% automated. My server had a ton of monazit gen in it, and since thorium dust can be gotten by grinding Monazit, this was a great, cheap way to get enough thorium. And, this is the double version, it can easily be removed so there's only one, and, on top of all that goodness, you can get exactly 128 eu/t from it. With the double, it's 256. And with two of them (no need for watching them at ALL), you can get 512 eu/t. It's convenient because now you don't need a transformer (unless you're going LV). And since gregtech machines now enjoy exploding, I couldn't have made this at a better time .
Also, you can omit the middle column, but it won't be easily automated, because I can just set up a timer for every 5 minutes (because timing it wrong could result in nothing going through, and the timer waiting for an entire 13 hours with no cells in the reactor could prove annoying).
This has only been tested in this planner, I have yet to find the time to go computercube on it, if anyone could and show me the results that would be appreciated.
Single uranium cells could be replaced for those who cannot afford the thorium.
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/v3/reactorplanner.html?a8h8ccvfnfhjk6i6hpjfn8srs1ibgtiijhcm2kx4unica2w4kxhvzaotej0vrd7fmhxr2wnvsftt7gg
EDIT: Uh oh, looks like someone already thought of my design. I'd like to give Chagrilled credits, but I came up with the doubling/automation (though that's not really important).
.Also, you can omit the middle column, but it won't be easily automated, because I can just set up a timer for every 5 minutes (because timing it wrong could result in nothing going through, and the timer waiting for an entire 13 hours with no cells in the reactor could prove annoying).
This has only been tested in this planner, I have yet to find the time to go computercube on it, if anyone could and show me the results that would be appreciated.
Single uranium cells could be replaced for those who cannot afford the thorium.
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/v3/reactorplanner.html?a8h8ccvfnfhjk6i6hpjfn8srs1ibgtiijhcm2kx4unica2w4kxhvzaotej0vrd7fmhxr2wnvsftt7gg
EDIT: Uh oh, looks like someone already thought of my design. I'd like to give Chagrilled credits, but I came up with the doubling/automation (though that's not really important).
You forgot the link to your design, this is just the link to the planner. After building what you want, click on "Copy URL" above the reactor grid and post that link.
*facepalm*
I tested it like three times to make sure it worked, hmmm...well I fixed it anyways, thank you.
That's the design used in Direwolf's LP series. I couldn't say where it originated, but note that the coolant cells are superfluous.
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