How to handle/automate efficient breeder reactors?

[Moleculor]

So I've seen some breeder reactor designs on the Industrial Craft forums that can breed something like 80+ deplete isotope cells over the life of a single uranium cell.

Only problem is that in order to breed that many depleted isotope cells, you have to keep switching them out when they charge up with fresh ones.

Now, I could do it by hand. Slowly. Over the course of the almost three hours the reactor runs. But the thought of that makes me yawn, and if I misclick a single time I could die in nuclear fire.

I was wondering if there was an easier way of dealing with it. Automating it, perhaps? I've looked at Turtles, but I can't even tell if they can drop or pick up items from a reactor, and it doesn't look like they have a way of picking up (or dropping off) items from a specific spot, even if they can interact with them.

Is there another way? Am I missing something?

I'm currently running on the Beta pack, though if there's a solution in a mod unavailable to me (RedPower, for example?) I'd still like to hear about it. (Though solutions appropriate for the Beta pack are what I'm looking for right now.)

 

[solidity]

I believe Routers from Factorization could be a solution to your problem. They have a few upgrades that allow them to pull/put from/to specific slots of a machine and also use filters to only take specific items. They're not exactly cheap and not exactly intuitive, though. Maybe try a bit of research in creative or watch DW20's spotlight on Factorization.

 

[ICountFrom0]

retriever? Pulse it often and tell it to pull the recharged cells. Item detector gives a pulse as the pulled cell goes through it, new depleted cell is fired into the reactor. You just need to keep the other spots full.

 

[Peppe]

In the beta pack i got pretty far with a advanced item loaders/unloaders from railcraft. You need a loader and unloader each touching a side of the breeder -- cart doesn't even have to move if you put a chamber to the side. It will near instantly move the isotopes/enriched cells around. I used an autocrafting table to create the isotopes -- you can get those in the cart with another loader, or i think you can pipe them right into the loader's buffer at the reactor.

In mindcrack pack redpower 2 makes it possible as well. You can use filters to pull out or place the cells. Simply because there is no cart entity to worry about i think the redpower 2 system is more reliable.

For either design i would not worry about a specific spot unless you want it fully automated. Instead just fill all the empty spots of the reactor and then the only items that you will be moving in/out can all go in the only remaining slots. Technically you could even place fresh urnanium/thorium in as it would only go to wrong slot if the timing is absolutely perfect and the breeder fuel runs out at the same time as it charges all the cells.

Filling all the slots of the reactor also lets you use my favorite reactor control method - a basic buildcraft gate on a pipe next to the reactor to turn it on only when the inventory is full. So you get a nice auto off if you run out of cells to charge or don't have a full set of 4.

 

[Abdiel]

GregTech Translocators with an item filter set to re-enriched cells. If you have another Translocator with a new set of depleted cells waiting, the switchover is almost instant. The advantage is that you don't need any ticking redstone signal or complicated detection methods. Make sure to fill in any empty spaces in your reactor so that the cells go in the right place (unless you fancy using one Advanced Buffer for each individual cell).