ReactorCraft - clever reactor setups?

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brujon

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It pretty accurately portrays a RL magnetic toroidal magnetic containment chamber that's used to keep the 150million degrees fusion plasma from spurting out in every direction and keeps it spinning and forcing more and more collisions and fusion events to take place. It's a toss up whether this will end up being the actual design that manages to generate more energy that's been put into it to make it work, or if other proposed designs for fusion reactors are the ones that'll end up being energy-positive. So far no luck on RL, but some say 10, some say 20, and some say 50 years before fusion reactors become efficient enough to become economically viable, safe, and stable enough to actually enter the energy grid. There's a whole conspiracy theory going on that we only haven't achieved that milestone because the Oil/Uranium/Mining/Energy-Related Industries are holding the technology back because they would go *poof* overnight after building Fusion Reactors become viable. Maybe it's true, maybe it isn't, maybe it's only half-true... Then there's Cold Fusion enthusiasts that swear to god they've managed to produce it, but somehow none of their papers are properly peer reviewed and accepted, and no reliable experimental technique was made public that reproduces the claimed events... We could very well die before the technology is commonplace, or we might see a breakthrough this or the next years. Meanwhile, we play with it in Minecraft thanks to Reika's awesome work!
 

Pyure

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Did some experimenting in creative on the nuclear reactor.
Neutrinos do cause a chain reaction in reactor blocks they hit, so I could see two designs being useful. If you just want to get something working a solid square with ~2 boiler outer edge works well -- if the temperature is not consistently above 100 on all boilers you have too many -- not sure if there is a benefit to being far above 100. Dipping below 100 I think would be wasting heat, but basically ensures 100% safety.
As far as I can tell, @Reika has a doctorate in, like, everything? So he may become sad if he sees you transforming his neutrons into neutrinos all willy-nilly.

If he's really on his game he may even direct you to http://what-if.xkcd.com/73/

Good info btw, thanks Peppe :)
 
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Pyure

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a design reika showed was a 7x7 setup, with 4 2x2 blocks of fuel cores surrounded by boilers.

B- boiler
F fuel core

BBBBBBB
BFFBFFB
BFFBFFB
BBBBBBB
BFFBFFB
BFFBFFB
BBBBBBB

tried it myself, runs stable, have yet to check output.

That looks fantastic, wish I'd seen his setup myself rather than bother everyone. I wonder where control rods and coolant cells will factor in. Maybe only if you expand that design a bit more (fractally)?

reikas response to the lack of documentation is that he is still working on the mod a fair bit.
presence of a manual will help though.
Yeah; things are changing so much he'd spend more time writing about it than implementing stuff. He should hire me as his official documenter.
 

Pyure

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Well I've been working towards my first reactor for around 4 days (20 hours or so) now. The prep work has taken longer than expected.

First set back was realizing I need blast glass which required a pulse jet furnace. I've read that it features possible explosions if not handled correctly. I was nervous.

I built it beside my bedroom.

I surrounded it with some serious blast-resistant walls just to be safe, fed it water and fuel, and created my blast glass; no issues. Tried to figure out how to make steel with it since the manual says its more "efficient"; couldn't figure it out. (I'm guessing the efficiency is based on iron-to-steel rather than energy efficiency. Either way I can't figure it out)

The second obstacle was power and rotational speed: I don't feel like centrifuging via low-level industrial coils which I'd need to babysit, so I needed to gather the necessary ingredients for jet fuel. Boy was I ever happy when I learned you don't spend 1-each of every required resource to make a single bucket of jet fuel. That process was very enjoyable. One result of this step of the process is that I've now acquired a blaze spawner for my base, and determined that spawner controllers are useless useless if you don't use them properly.(enough torque/speed to get the delay to "400" is still slower than the thing spawns on its own, or no noticable difference.)

I'm currently centrifuging UF6. I have two isotope centrifuges powered by a microturbine each. As of last night I've accumulated around 10 refined uranium, and about 10x that in depleted variety.

Questions to ya'all:
1) At what point should I consider using this uranium for power? (How much should I have to start)
2) Should I look into a Breeder reactor first since I'll have so much of the depleted uranium initially?
3) Am I really going to NET a ton of power from this? I'm spending a ton of energy on the project so far. The amount of jet fuel I'm spending would be worth a fair chunk of power on its own.
 
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eric167

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That looks fantastic, wish I'd seen his setup myself rather than bother everyone. I wonder where control rods and coolant cells will factor in. Maybe only if you expand that design a bit more (fractally)?

I believe the way that one is set up you wont ever need coolant cells/control rods, just make sure all those boilers are well-watered and you have the turbine capacity to use the steam .
you can also swap boilers (I recommend one of those middle ones between the fuel cores) for irradiation chambers or breeders

middle 9 blocks: F- core, B- boiler, C- irradiation or breeder
FCF
CBC
FCF

or if you have a 3x3 block of fuel cores instead of the 2x2 I have shown you can simply do the middle section with irradiation chambers. (each block is still a 2x2 group of fuel cores)


on to your questions

1) the above design uses a stack of fuel pellets (2x2x4 clustersx4 pellets per core) for a full load.
I think you can drop to a single 2x2 unit and need 16.

2) probably. reika, do plutonium pellets burn faster and hotter?

3) yep. above has 33 boilers in it, and they all run hot enough to produce steam.


when I have time I will do some tests to get better answers for you.

I recommend loading a superflat creative world and just trying stuff out. start small, work your way up, make a few radioactive craters.
 
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Reika

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determined that spawner controllers are useless (enough torque/speed to get the delay to "400" is still slower than the thing spawns on its own, or no noticable difference.)
At 400 ticks, probably. Try at 0 ticks, like I have in my world.

2) probably. reika, do plutonium pellets burn faster and hotter?
Yes, and they make more waste, too.
 
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Pyure

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I believe the way that one is set up you wont ever need coolant cells/control rods, just make sure all those boilers are well-watered and you have the turbine capacity to use the steam .
you can also swap boilers (I recommend one of those middle ones between the fuel cores) for irradiation chambers or breeders

middle 9 blocks: F- core, B- boiler, C- irradiation or breeder
FCF
CBC
FCF

or if you have a 3x3 block of fuel cores instead of the 2x2 I have shown you can simply do the middle section with irradiation chambers. (each block is still a 2x2 group of fuel cores)


on to your questions

1) the above design uses a stack of fuel pellets (2x2x4 clustersx4 pellets per core) for a full load.
I think you can drop to a single 2x2 unit and need 16.

2) probably. reika, do plutonium pellets burn faster and hotter?

3) yep. above has 33 boilers in it, and they all run hot enough to produce steam.


when I have time I will do some tests to get better answers for you.

I recommend loading a superflat creative world and just trying stuff out. start small, work your way up, make a few radioactive craters.

100% agree on superflat testing world. Reika's toys can be...temperamental. And really, who would build a nuclear reactor without some decent simulations?[DOUBLEPOST=1395071738][/DOUBLEPOST]
At 400 ticks, probably. Try at 0 ticks, like I have in my world..
You clearly don't try to power everything with rebalanced industrial coils. Or I'm clearly not gearing one correctly. ( I *think* I tried 8x1024 gearing for speed; I forget.)
 

ThePixie35

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Is it crazy that I can actually have a use for something that apparently produces unlimited amounts of power? Actually more than one at that. The only thing really holding me back is the highest pipe output I have found in monster is the enderIO one at 20k RF/t and even that isn't enough...
Take the power out as shaft power? Then to RF.
 

Werenoun

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Speaking of the spawner controllers, are they subject to the vanilla spawning mechanics as well? They don't seem to spawn when I'm not online and/or around (making running the boilers on blaze rods an exercise in futility).
 

Reika

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Speaking of the spawner controllers, are they subject to the vanilla spawning mechanics as well? They don't seem to spawn when I'm not online and/or around (making running the boilers on blaze rods an exercise in futility).
They are subject to light level rules only. What is the spawn limit set to?
 

Werenoun

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They are subject to light level rules only. What is the spawn limit set to?
I'm not sure about the spawn limit. I'm checking with the person running the server now.

We're running 17b, if that matters. I hadn't seen anything in the changelogs about updates to the controller, but I may have missed something.
 

Werenoun

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I'm not sure about the spawn limit. I'm checking with the person running the server now.

We're running 17b, if that matters. I hadn't seen anything in the changelogs about updates to the controller, but I may have missed something.
Looks like spawn limit for rotarycraft is 128. I had some torches in there (they were spawning regardless), but I removed them and retested with the same result of no spawns when the chunk was not player-loaded.
 

Werenoun

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The chunk does need to be loaded, yes. That should be fairly obvious.
I assumed that was a given. The chunk is loaded via a chicken chunks chunkloader.

My previous statement was to differentiate force-loaded chunks (via chunkloader) from player-loaded chunks (standing next to it). My apologies for not communicating that more clearly.
 

Reika

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I assumed that was a given. The chunk is loaded via a chicken chunks chunkloader.

My previous statement was to differentiate force-loaded chunks (via chunkloader) from player-loaded chunks (standing next to it). My apologies for not communicating that more clearly.
As far as I know, there is no difference. Also, in my own experience, chunkloaders work fine on spawner controllers.
 

Werenoun

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As far as I know, there is no difference. Also, in my own experience, chunkloaders work fine on spawner controllers.
Okay. I'll play with the setup and see which part is breaking down, then, with the assumption that it is not the controller.

Thanks for your help!
 

Pyure

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I'm having a ton of fun with this. Last night I got pretty close to my initial reactor setup.

I now have 32 refined uranium pellets, 4 reactor cores and 8 boilers. I'm hoping that's enough for a small reactor start.


Going to try:
_BB_
BRRB
BRRB
_BB_

Out of curiosity, would a second "ring" of boilers heat up enough to create any steam? I'm guessing when a boiler is heated up by a neutron, it effectively eats that neutron, but that some still make their way through. The resource cost might be steep but it would increase the efficiency of my reactor cores.

Basically:
__BB__
__BB__
BBRRBB
BBRRBB
__BB__
__BB__

I'll be able to test this myself tonight, but any discussion on the topic is likely going to be of benefit to myself and possibly others.


@Reika: Does your steam "disperse" at all? It would be interesting if a given block of steam had a chance to divide into two smaller blocks, with the chance proportionate to how confined an area its in (check x/y coords 2-3 blocks each direction). If a block disperses into two blocks, one block would move to the side one meter, therefore likely missing your turbine.

As a result, creating steam into the open air would be less effective than in a walled-in pipe. CPU/GPU considerations might be mitigated in two ways: steam should completely dissipate after it moves X blocks (20?) or disperses recursively Y times (4?).

You should likely consider killing the steam after X block movements anyway just to save machine resources, or make it configurable.
 

Reika

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@Reika: Does your steam "disperse" at all? It would be interesting if a given block of steam had a chance to divide into two smaller blocks, with the chance proportionate to how confined an area its in (check x/y coords 2-3 blocks each direction). If a block disperses into two blocks, one block would move to the side one meter, therefore likely missing your turbine.

As a result, creating steam into the open air would be less effective than in a walled-in pipe. CPU/GPU considerations might be mitigated in two ways: steam should completely dissipate after it moves X blocks (20?) or disperses recursively Y times (4?).

You should likely consider killing the steam after X block movements anyway just to save machine resources, or make it configurable.

There is no way to do this without making steam a TileEntity, which would be a very bad idea.