This is false.
Yes it is.
Also, the Fluid Extractor can take in power from the bottom as well, and does not require water below it.
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[ReactorCraft] ReC Mechanics Thread
- Thread starter RavynousHunter
- Start date
Also, the Fluid Extractor can take in power from the bottom as well, and does not require water below it.
I'll experiment a little more, see if maybe I was just missing something.
Will note in the post.
Will also note in the post.
Thankee for the corrections, I'll make them soon as I'm able.
I tried putting a 4x, 16x, 64x, and a 256x tile accelerator (one after the other, not all at once) on a uranium processor and noticed no increase in the speed at which it processed uranium ingots. Does it work only for fluorite?
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Zimbul
Guest
Got my reactor upgraded and running a HP turbine tonight. It did improve my frame rate switching to it, where I got 10 - 15 with a lp turbine running, with only a hp turbine I get 25 to 30, yay! Maybe it's the lack of steam blocks traveling around from a lp turbine that makes the difference?
But a couple of numbers to add, on ammonia a HP turbine outputs 12.7gw, about 24.5 million rf/t. Also, the HP turbine apparently uses a pretty insane amount of lubricant. I've got a pretty good sized canola see farm, and 1 tick operation on canola seeds and husks to lurbricant. Probably bringing in around 20 seeds per second, yet the hp turbine outpaces that lubricant production rate....
But I do have a question someone here might be able to help with. I can't figure out why, I'm steadily losing ammonia. I've got a reservoir under the hp turbine (a line of them wider than the turbine itself) and it is collecting the low pressure ammonia and I have pressurizers converting it as fast as they can (faster than it's filling the reservoir). But I'm still loosing about 1k ammonia ever 3 to 5 minutes somewhere... Can't figure out where. I thought it might be getting backed up in the steam line, so I put some grates on the pipe as well to get rid of excess steam directly into condensers piped to the reservoir so that it goes to the pressurizers. So the amount in the steam line is decreasing now and I'm still loosing ammonia. Is there an ammonia loss with a hp turbine or should I be seeing a 1:1 return with pressurizing it?
Along that same note, is there anyway to bleed off only excess steam? With my HP turbine running 3 steam grates seem to bleed off steam, is a little to fast and eventually the turbine will loose power. Even though I have the grates further down the line than the hp turbine. 2 grates seem to be slightly to fast as well, but one grate is not fast enough and steam builds up in the line... Are there any steam valves or anything that will only let the right amount of steam through so that my turbine still receives all it needs without any excess getting backed up in the lines?
But a couple of numbers to add, on ammonia a HP turbine outputs 12.7gw, about 24.5 million rf/t. Also, the HP turbine apparently uses a pretty insane amount of lubricant. I've got a pretty good sized canola see farm, and 1 tick operation on canola seeds and husks to lurbricant. Probably bringing in around 20 seeds per second, yet the hp turbine outpaces that lubricant production rate....
But I do have a question someone here might be able to help with. I can't figure out why, I'm steadily losing ammonia. I've got a reservoir under the hp turbine (a line of them wider than the turbine itself) and it is collecting the low pressure ammonia and I have pressurizers converting it as fast as they can (faster than it's filling the reservoir). But I'm still loosing about 1k ammonia ever 3 to 5 minutes somewhere... Can't figure out where. I thought it might be getting backed up in the steam line, so I put some grates on the pipe as well to get rid of excess steam directly into condensers piped to the reservoir so that it goes to the pressurizers. So the amount in the steam line is decreasing now and I'm still loosing ammonia. Is there an ammonia loss with a hp turbine or should I be seeing a 1:1 return with pressurizing it?
Along that same note, is there anyway to bleed off only excess steam? With my HP turbine running 3 steam grates seem to bleed off steam, is a little to fast and eventually the turbine will loose power. Even though I have the grates further down the line than the hp turbine. 2 grates seem to be slightly to fast as well, but one grate is not fast enough and steam builds up in the line... Are there any steam valves or anything that will only let the right amount of steam through so that my turbine still receives all it needs without any excess getting backed up in the lines?
The ammonia loop isn't fully lossless
It was discussed recently in the "[By Request] RotaryCraft Suggestions" thread.
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Zimbul
Guest
Ah ok, thanks. 1k buckets every few minutes seems like more than a slight loss to me but guess it is what it is lol. I'll just have to go hunt down a calcite dimlet tomorrow so that I can have a virtually endless supply of ammonia. I don't think I want to make a chicken farm big enough to provide enough eggs to keep up with that rate of loss lol. That would take a few hundred chickens probably... Unless there is some other method of getting the eggs that I don't know lol.
I went from 73k buckets of ammonia to 22k in around 4 hours tonight.
I've got 51 million ammonium chloride stored though, so if I can find a calcite dimlet that should make quite a bit of ammonia 
As long as its at atmospheric pressure and above 56.5 degrees C anyway. At lower temperatures and atm pressure it's a solid, and presumably at higher pressures it can be in a liquid state. But processing is mostly done with it as a gas as far as I can see, so that makes perfect sense in the context you're using!
@Zimbul: Are you using steam grates with an HP turbine? They don't need them, just a steam line. Also, having excess steam in the lines is NOT harmful. As far as I'm aware, steam lines can't explode from anything but a cascading ammonia detonation and their max capacity is, I think, Integer.MAX_VALUE or 2.4 billion cubic meters of steam. Hell, I'd go so far as to say that excess is good, as it shows you've got a good setup going.
[ETA]
Actually, excess steam is a good thing. If, for some reason, you need to take your reactor offline (say, changing design or running low on fuel), then you'll have power built up in your lines to keep things running for a little while longer, which can make all the difference. But, to reiterate, there is no inherent danger in having a lot of steam in your lines. You're thinking a little too realistically.
[ETA]
Actually, excess steam is a good thing. If, for some reason, you need to take your reactor offline (say, changing design or running low on fuel), then you'll have power built up in your lines to keep things running for a little while longer, which can make all the difference. But, to reiterate, there is no inherent danger in having a lot of steam in your lines. You're thinking a little too realistically.
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Z
Zimbul
Guest
@Zimbul: Are you using steam grates with an HP turbine? They don't need them, just a steam line. Also, having excess steam in the lines is NOT harmful. As far as I'm aware, steam lines can't explode from anything but a cascading ammonia detonation and their max capacity is, I think, Integer.MAX_VALUE or 2.4 billion cubic meters of steam. Hell, I'd go so far as to say that excess is good, as it shows you've got a good setup going.
[ETA]
Actually, excess steam is a good thing. If, for some reason, you need to take your reactor offline (say, changing design or running low on fuel), then you'll have power built up in your lines to keep things running for a little while longer, which can make all the difference. But, to reiterate, there is no inherent danger in having a lot of steam in your lines. You're thinking a little too realistically.
I'm not using a steam grate for the HP turbine. I was trying to bleed off excess because yes I thought the steam lines might blow up under excess pressure and because of the huge losses I'm seeing in ammonia. Was thinking it might've been getting stuck in the line since I was seeing more than 1000 m^3 in the line, so I was trying to get it out of the line to turn the low pressure back into regular ammonia.
Right now I've had to shut down my reactor until I can get a sufficient ammonia supply coming in
Luckily I have had a RF Storage Battery charging for a couple of days now so I had around 12.5 TRF stored and that should keep my base powered for a few days until I sort it out lol.On the note of excess steam though. I'm wondering, Reika said it would take around x8 times more steam to power a HP turbine. So does that mean if I had enough steam production to run the hp turbine and 8 steam grates continously, I'd have enough to run 2 x HP turbines? Obviously right now I don't since 2 steam grates will rob the 1 HP Turbine of steam, but just curious.
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Maybe? I'm honestly not sure, but it sounds right. But, yeah, no need to worry about excess in terms of accidentally blowing things up. As for getting enough ammonia, I'm assuming your choke point is ammonium chloride, in which case, you might think about running a boring machine at around Y=30, I think, in hell and, if possible, enchanting it with silk touch so you can run your ore thru the extractor to get more dust per block. As far as I'm aware, that's the only way to make ammonium chloride renewable in any sense of the term.
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Zimbul
Guest
Nah, my choke point is calcite. I've got over 51 million ammonium chloride (set up an ender quarry in a single flat ammonium chloride rf tools dimension lol, I just haven't found a calcite dimlet yet to do the same for it). I really wonder if I'm losing more ammonia than I should be for some reason though, 1k buckets of ammonia lost every 4 minutes seems excessive.
You can make quicklime with a chicken egg farm. I think you need a blast furnace at...I wanna say either 600C or 800C, minimum. As for the loss rate, I honestly don't know, I've been kinda scared off of ammonia as I used it in a test world (admittedly, it was a bad reactor design) and...well, let's just say the resulting light show was rather spectacular.
Z
Zimbul
Guest
That would take hundreds if not thousands of chickens to keep up with that rate I think lol.
I have no idea if my reactor design is good or not, there isn't enough data for me to really know, it's just a guessing game. The cores bounce between 140 and 280c at the highest I've observed. The steam boilers I've only observed exceeding 120c once, it got to about 160 and then quickly fell back down to 100. So I don't think it's at great risk of reaching the 650c ammonia detonation point. I've honestly had troubles making reactors that get hot period. My first couple of reactors couldn't even maintain over 100c lol.
Right now I'm running what I consider a pretty basic design. 4 - 2x2 fuel core groups, with steam boilers on the inside and outside, with double rows of reflectors at all the outside possible neutron travel paths and the 3 layers of steel around everything. I only used this many steam boilers in an attempt to make enough steam with this design to push a HP turbine, which appears to have worked accept for burning through a pretty high amount of ammonia. I could probably take out a couple of boilers, maybe that would help with the ammonia loss.
Fission
This one's a biggie, and will probably span at least two posts, if not more, because there's a lot of ground to cover. Fission is what I consider the breaking point of the mod, where you start really getting some serious juice. Once you become able to reliably run at least one high-pressure turbine, you can start working towards madness level: fusion. This is especially true if you use ElectriCraft. Which I do. Extensively. Note for ElC users: go for superconductors when working with reactor-level electricity. While the loss might not be too terrible, considering the sheer amount of power you're getting, the current limitations can be annoying to deal with and, honestly, once you hit reactor level, you should be able to produce at least a few stacks of insulated, filled superconductors.
So, how does fission work? Well, you've got three main things that are omnipresent in fission-based reactors: fuel cores, boilers, and neutron reflectors. Fuel cores are obvious: they store fuel and are the main working part of your reactor. Boilers, running either water or ammonia, turn the heat of fission into steam, which runs your turbines. Neutron reflectors take up a somewhat special place: they, as the name suggests, reflect neutrons back from whence they came. Neutron flux causes fission, and more neutrons equals more fission, which in turn equals more heat and, finally, more power. However, be very, very careful, as too much fission is a far, far worse thing than too little fission. If your reactor melts down, you will be left with a big hole (granted, not as big as IC2, but big enough to be a bother) beneath your reactor, radiation everywhere, and ludicrously toxic corium where parts of your reactor used to be. As you might guess, this is a bad thing. Radiation kills all living things, especially plant life. If you're running farms near a reactor that goes critical, you can say goodbye to farming there until you do some massive cleanup.
There are other, not as often-used (in my experience) parts that can make reactors safer, however: control rods, coolant cells, and reactor CPUs. Coolant cells are the simplest: they take in coolant and keep the reactor from overheating. The downside is that this does not make steam and, thus, does not make power, its only purpose is keeping the reactor cool. The control rods act as part of a failsafe mechanism: by triggering them, you can prevent neutron flow and, thus, stop the reactor in its tracks. The CPU (which requires 1kW per control rod) is very useful when using control rods as it can, on redstone signal, cause all rods in the connected reactor to fall into place at once and it can also do so during a SCRAM event, when reactor temperatures reach dangerous levels.
When it comes to fuel, the standard (non-breeder) fission reactor can take two varieties: U-235, or Pu-239. Plutonium (Pu-239) is more reactive than Uranium (U-235), and thus, is more likely to trigger fission when the core ticks and, thus, more likely to produce more neutrons. Alas, this also means that plutonium-based reactors run hotter and require greater heat dissipation and safety measures than their uranium-based counterparts. Of course, this also means that you tend to get more power per unit fuel out of plutonium than you do uranium. Plutonium also has the risk that, unless you're wearing a hazmat suit (and a full one, at that), then you will suffer radiation poisoning if you have it in your inventory, so handle with care. The fuel stats are thus:
Uranium-235
Every time fission occurs, a neutron burst is spawned and is sent out in any horizontal direction. This burst can collide with other fuel cores and have a chance to trigger fission there, as well. Therefore, more nearby cores means more fission, which leads to more heat, which leads to more power, but also more danger. The important thing is to balance the forces of fission and heat, giving your reactor enough places for heat to go (that aren't other fuel cores) so that the fuel cores don't overheat and meltdown while also taking care to ensure that your boilers don't overheat and blow up.
This one's a biggie, and will probably span at least two posts, if not more, because there's a lot of ground to cover. Fission is what I consider the breaking point of the mod, where you start really getting some serious juice. Once you become able to reliably run at least one high-pressure turbine, you can start working towards madness level: fusion. This is especially true if you use ElectriCraft. Which I do. Extensively. Note for ElC users: go for superconductors when working with reactor-level electricity. While the loss might not be too terrible, considering the sheer amount of power you're getting, the current limitations can be annoying to deal with and, honestly, once you hit reactor level, you should be able to produce at least a few stacks of insulated, filled superconductors.
So, how does fission work? Well, you've got three main things that are omnipresent in fission-based reactors: fuel cores, boilers, and neutron reflectors. Fuel cores are obvious: they store fuel and are the main working part of your reactor. Boilers, running either water or ammonia, turn the heat of fission into steam, which runs your turbines. Neutron reflectors take up a somewhat special place: they, as the name suggests, reflect neutrons back from whence they came. Neutron flux causes fission, and more neutrons equals more fission, which in turn equals more heat and, finally, more power. However, be very, very careful, as too much fission is a far, far worse thing than too little fission. If your reactor melts down, you will be left with a big hole (granted, not as big as IC2, but big enough to be a bother) beneath your reactor, radiation everywhere, and ludicrously toxic corium where parts of your reactor used to be. As you might guess, this is a bad thing. Radiation kills all living things, especially plant life. If you're running farms near a reactor that goes critical, you can say goodbye to farming there until you do some massive cleanup.
There are other, not as often-used (in my experience) parts that can make reactors safer, however: control rods, coolant cells, and reactor CPUs. Coolant cells are the simplest: they take in coolant and keep the reactor from overheating. The downside is that this does not make steam and, thus, does not make power, its only purpose is keeping the reactor cool. The control rods act as part of a failsafe mechanism: by triggering them, you can prevent neutron flow and, thus, stop the reactor in its tracks. The CPU (which requires 1kW per control rod) is very useful when using control rods as it can, on redstone signal, cause all rods in the connected reactor to fall into place at once and it can also do so during a SCRAM event, when reactor temperatures reach dangerous levels.
When it comes to fuel, the standard (non-breeder) fission reactor can take two varieties: U-235, or Pu-239. Plutonium (Pu-239) is more reactive than Uranium (U-235), and thus, is more likely to trigger fission when the core ticks and, thus, more likely to produce more neutrons. Alas, this also means that plutonium-based reactors run hotter and require greater heat dissipation and safety measures than their uranium-based counterparts. Of course, this also means that you tend to get more power per unit fuel out of plutonium than you do uranium. Plutonium also has the risk that, unless you're wearing a hazmat suit (and a full one, at that), then you will suffer radiation poisoning if you have it in your inventory, so handle with care. The fuel stats are thus:
Uranium-235
- Fission chance: 25%
- Chance to deplete by +1%: 3%
- Chance to produce waste: 5%
- Temperature step: 20 degrees
- Fission chance: 30%
- Chance to deplete by +1%: 4%
- Chance to produce waste: 10%
- Temperature step: 30 degrees
Every time fission occurs, a neutron burst is spawned and is sent out in any horizontal direction. This burst can collide with other fuel cores and have a chance to trigger fission there, as well. Therefore, more nearby cores means more fission, which leads to more heat, which leads to more power, but also more danger. The important thing is to balance the forces of fission and heat, giving your reactor enough places for heat to go (that aren't other fuel cores) so that the fuel cores don't overheat and meltdown while also taking care to ensure that your boilers don't overheat and blow up.
Fission, cont'd
Fission has more uses than just generating power. In fact, if you want to move on to something meatier (that is, in a word: fusion), you need fission. Why? Simply put, you need neutrons. Not tonnes of them, but you do need them. Once you've got a heavy water pump working (which I'll discuss in the fusion part, later) and are electrolyzing D2O for that delicious deuterium, you'll want to bombard some of that deuterium with neutrons to turn it into tritium. The simplest way to do this is just putting a neutron irradiation chambre within firing range of one or more of your fission cores. Neutrons will hit them, and you can then pull tritium out the bottom and store it for use later. Note that both deuterium and tritium, being isotopes of hydrogen, are gases.
Now, as I said earlier, there's three kinds of fission reactor: standard, LMFBR, and the LFTR. Just as a note: I have little, if any, personal experience with these reactors and anything I say relating to them is to be taken as, at best, an educated guess based off of what I read in the code, nothing more. Next up is the LMFBR, or Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor. What's this do that the normal fission reactor doesn't? Well, for one, it takes a different kind of pellet: a purpose-made breeder reactor pellet that is made from 4 depleted uranium pellets and 1 U-235 pellet. The neutron radiation from the U-235 in the pellets, when fed into a LMFBR core, will bombard the U-238 surrounding it and convert the mass into usable plutonium-239 fuel.
The LMFBR produces far more neutron flux than a standard fission reactor (unless you build the latter to absurd, and possibly explosive, sizes) and, thus, needs something a bit meatier than water or ammonia as its heat transfer medium, something that doesn't slow down neutrons quite as much. In this vein, the LMFBR uses molten sodium (from electrolyzing salt) in special heaters that produces hot molten sodium that you must run through heat exchangers to get useful steam out of the equation and complete the thermodynamic cycle. Note that the only heater that works for the breeder is the sodium heater and, thus, the only working fluid it'll actually dump heat into is molten sodium; anything else, and you will end up with a radioactive crater after your reactor promptly melts the hell down. Also, the reactor fuel rods have a maximum temperature of 900 Celsius, so extra care needs to be taken to ensure proper heat dissipation for breeders. Breeders also still produce normal nuclear waste products, so you will need to take that into consideration when planning your transport logistics for the reactor.
Breeders produce fission-type neutrons (duh) and, thus, can trigger fission in nearby standard/breeder cores. Breeder neutrons to not trigger fission in thorium fuel cores; you'll need standard fission neutrons to kickstart your LFTR. They're also the only kind of neutron that can trigger fuel conversion (breeder -> Pu-239).
The LMFBR's reaction works, in the words of Reika, much like an explosion: the more heat you have, the more reactivity you get...until things overheat and promptly go straight to hell. Greater heat means faster reaction times and, thus, faster fuel conversion. This can be good if you need a lot of plutonium for your standard fission reactors, but I must stress that there is an upper limit with a breeder's temperature: steel can only get so hot before it starts to melt. A balance point must be found between fast reaction times and having enough heat dissipation to not have things go all Chernobyl on you.
In order to produce hot molten sodium, your sodium heaters need to be running at least 301 Celsius. This gives you an effective range of 301-899C, inclusive, or 598 degrees between enough heat to make power, and too much heat. Thankfully, there's no loss involved in the thermodynamic cycle of sodium, so once you have enough to fill your heaters (again, with some leftover as a buffer), you don't need to make any more unless you plan to make more breeders.
The good thing about breeders is, since they operate at a higher temperature (remember, hot sodium is at least 301C), you can boil more water faster and, thus, get more power. So, while they are more logistically challenging and more dangerous, you do tend to get more power out of a breeder than you do out of a comparable standard fission setup, but one needs to take care to remember that this is all relative and various environmental factors can greatly influence your reactor's performance, up to and including the time of day.
General Fission Notes
Fission has more uses than just generating power. In fact, if you want to move on to something meatier (that is, in a word: fusion), you need fission. Why? Simply put, you need neutrons. Not tonnes of them, but you do need them. Once you've got a heavy water pump working (which I'll discuss in the fusion part, later) and are electrolyzing D2O for that delicious deuterium, you'll want to bombard some of that deuterium with neutrons to turn it into tritium. The simplest way to do this is just putting a neutron irradiation chambre within firing range of one or more of your fission cores. Neutrons will hit them, and you can then pull tritium out the bottom and store it for use later. Note that both deuterium and tritium, being isotopes of hydrogen, are gases.
Now, as I said earlier, there's three kinds of fission reactor: standard, LMFBR, and the LFTR. Just as a note: I have little, if any, personal experience with these reactors and anything I say relating to them is to be taken as, at best, an educated guess based off of what I read in the code, nothing more. Next up is the LMFBR, or Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor. What's this do that the normal fission reactor doesn't? Well, for one, it takes a different kind of pellet: a purpose-made breeder reactor pellet that is made from 4 depleted uranium pellets and 1 U-235 pellet. The neutron radiation from the U-235 in the pellets, when fed into a LMFBR core, will bombard the U-238 surrounding it and convert the mass into usable plutonium-239 fuel.
The LMFBR produces far more neutron flux than a standard fission reactor (unless you build the latter to absurd, and possibly explosive, sizes) and, thus, needs something a bit meatier than water or ammonia as its heat transfer medium, something that doesn't slow down neutrons quite as much. In this vein, the LMFBR uses molten sodium (from electrolyzing salt) in special heaters that produces hot molten sodium that you must run through heat exchangers to get useful steam out of the equation and complete the thermodynamic cycle. Note that the only heater that works for the breeder is the sodium heater and, thus, the only working fluid it'll actually dump heat into is molten sodium; anything else, and you will end up with a radioactive crater after your reactor promptly melts the hell down. Also, the reactor fuel rods have a maximum temperature of 900 Celsius, so extra care needs to be taken to ensure proper heat dissipation for breeders. Breeders also still produce normal nuclear waste products, so you will need to take that into consideration when planning your transport logistics for the reactor.
Breeders produce fission-type neutrons (duh) and, thus, can trigger fission in nearby standard/breeder cores. Breeder neutrons to not trigger fission in thorium fuel cores; you'll need standard fission neutrons to kickstart your LFTR. They're also the only kind of neutron that can trigger fuel conversion (breeder -> Pu-239).
The LMFBR's reaction works, in the words of Reika, much like an explosion: the more heat you have, the more reactivity you get...until things overheat and promptly go straight to hell. Greater heat means faster reaction times and, thus, faster fuel conversion. This can be good if you need a lot of plutonium for your standard fission reactors, but I must stress that there is an upper limit with a breeder's temperature: steel can only get so hot before it starts to melt. A balance point must be found between fast reaction times and having enough heat dissipation to not have things go all Chernobyl on you.
In order to produce hot molten sodium, your sodium heaters need to be running at least 301 Celsius. This gives you an effective range of 301-899C, inclusive, or 598 degrees between enough heat to make power, and too much heat. Thankfully, there's no loss involved in the thermodynamic cycle of sodium, so once you have enough to fill your heaters (again, with some leftover as a buffer), you don't need to make any more unless you plan to make more breeders.
The good thing about breeders is, since they operate at a higher temperature (remember, hot sodium is at least 301C), you can boil more water faster and, thus, get more power. So, while they are more logistically challenging and more dangerous, you do tend to get more power out of a breeder than you do out of a comparable standard fission setup, but one needs to take care to remember that this is all relative and various environmental factors can greatly influence your reactor's performance, up to and including the time of day.
General Fission Notes
- If you have a mod like Extra Utilities or RFTools available alongside ChromatiCraft, I highly recommend you build your reactors in an alternate dimension and/or far away from your home. World Rifts, while admittedly late-game ChC, can be used to transfer steam across dimensions, as well as shaft power. Note that this is directional, so any side where you input power/steam in a rift pair, the opposite side will have the output in the destination rift.
- Do not bury your reactors deep, if at all. Depth, past a certain point, can increase reactor temperatures greatly, leading to an increased likelihood of failure. I have personally experienced this: I built my base underground and, like an idiot, built my reactor there...let's just say I had to restore from a backup because my reactor room now featured a nice hole full of highly radioactive material.
- Conversely, do not build your reactors too high up, either, as this can have the opposite effect, making your reactor too cold to run properly. The same goes for cold biomes. If at all possible, build your reactors in a temperate biome (I prefer oceans) at sea level (Y=64 to about 70 or so). The highest temperature, at high noon, should only be around 25-30C, which is right in the middle between deserts and taigas.
- Too many boilers is better than too few boilers, and its better to run your reactor too cold as opposed to too hot. If your reactor is too cold, it just won't make any power and, while it might waste fuel trying in vain to get going, it at least won't end up making a mess out of whatever room you're using to house the thing. If all else fails, you can move your reactor. Removing radiation and corium is significantly more costly and difficult, not to mention incredibly hazardous to one's health.
- When first firing up your reactor, monitor it for a while. While your design might be relatively safe, there is no such thing as being too safe when splitting the atom. If your reactor reaches critical temperature (ie: hisses more than very rarely), disable it, even if that means removing the fuel cores. Trust me on this: my molecular disassembler (on fast mode, for obvious reasons) has saved me from meltdowns more than once. Again, better to go back to the drawing board than to end up with a crater.
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One correction: The reason for breeder reactors using sodium instead of water has nothing to do with thermodynamics, but instead nuclear physics: the neutron velocity from a breeder reaction is such that water absorbs the neutrons, wasting them. Sodium does not have this problem.
A lower neutron cross-section would make it absorb less. This is simply because water would absorb some of the neutron energy - either slowing them or absorbing them entirely - and reduce efficiency.
@Reika: I've noticed something peculiar whilst building my tokamak. Is it...normal to need the van de Graff generators inside the toroids to transmit charge? Because the only way I've gotten them to take a charge (each is receiving 1MW) is to place them inside the toroid magnets; like, actually touching the (invisible) block in the centre.