Im starting to plan my nuclear setup a bit and i was thinking of going really all out this time so i figured id give the gregtech turbines a go. Most likely i will go with a combination of mark 5 nuclear controle iridium reflector designs with regular, mox or thorium depending on what fuels i have
Cool ! Nuclear is fun
I'm not sure if you can make a MOX fluid reactor. It either won't work or else it will be horribly inefficient / too low power. MOX cores need to be hot and stay hot, 80% or so.
Fluid reactor cores, however, need to stay cool, or else they blow up and stuff. Also consider you will need Lutetium for Fusion MkII, which can only be made from depleted Thorium fuel cells, *and* Thorium is super-efficient, Thorium Relfector is a good way to go.
If you don't want to go with Thorium, do a conventional Uranium.
Is there any good summary on the large heat exchanger and high pressure steam turbine somewhere? I checked the wiki but im missing some important parts, for instance do you need a train of turbines for superheated steam (superheated steam to steam to distilled water). Also is the distilled water just outputted from the large turbine or do you need something like the ic2 condenser?
Also what is the best rotors? as i understand it they both have an optimal output but also its own internal efficiency so you will want the best material as long as you can supply enough steam to run it at optimal output. One final thing, i realize i need is something to regulate the flowrates of steam and hot coolant, is there a gregtech block that does that?
A single Heat Exchanger (HE) will power several pairs of High Pressure (HP) and Low Pressure (LP) steam turbines. Indeed, you will (should) be at Mk. I Fusion long before you exhaust the capacity of a single Heat Exchanger.
Starting out, making enough Hot Cooant (HC) to make Super-Heated Steam (SH Steam) is the challenge, especially with Thorium. You will need multiple Thorioum Reflector fluid reactors to make enough HC to meet the SH Steam minimum. If you go with Uranium, it's less. You may only need 1 or 2.
For distilled water, I recommend at least a 256 bucket reserve, i.e. 1 ExUt drum's worth. You can make this using a simple GT 1-block refinery. No need for the multi-block fractional distillation tower. The distilled water is returned from the your normal (low) pressure Large Turbine and should be fed into your Heat Exchanger. The steam/water cycle is thus:
Distilled Water --> HE --> SH Steam --> HP Turbine --> Steam --> LP Turbine --> Distilled Water
The closed loop will be 100% lossless *if* you don't exceed the input buffer of any of the multi-blocks. This is easy to maintain once it's setup, but very hard to tune the 1st time out.
I *highly* recommend using IC2 Fluid Regulators. Yes, they look funny and work funny, but they work. It works for any kind of fluid. You won't need it for the IC2 Hot Coolant and (non-Hot) Coolant. You will *need* to be recycling 100% of that with no flow control through the HE. However, you will need to regulate your SH Steam input into your HP Turbine and possibly your regular Steam input into you LP Turbine.
As for rotors, it depends largely upon your flow rate. Personally, I aim to have a flow rate suitable for Large Tungstensteel Rotors. Those are, IMHO, about the best rotors in terms of flow rate, efficiency, and material availability you can build before the Huge rotors. You need Fusion MkII, IIRC, to make the Huge rotors.
To get *all* of those parts working is a true engineering / plumbing challenge. You have to balance rotor flow rates against SH Steam minimum against reactor design Hot Coolant output, and keep everything from blowing up. Not easy, but quite fun
