More efficient/completely safe nuclear reactor setups?

[Antice]

Until I gave up and started centrifuging lava I couldn't afford a nuclear reactor between everything else going on I have noone to blame but myself for that

I find this to be true also. I am seriously starting to question wither using geothermals is actually worth it now, since those resources you get from centrifuging lava is wort more than the energy. I try to rush into getting biomass power instead, so once i do i retire the geothermal i build in the beginning to power my jetpack and induction furnace. (it's a wasted item i know, but i can't stand to use bc power for smelting. it makes no sense to use mechanical power for smelting stuff in my mind).

I got to mention that I don't do the whole magma crucible thing, i feel that it becomes too much of a free stuff from nothing kind of thing that way. (i would in a skylands challenge map tho. sicne the whole point of those is to cheeze out as much stuff as you could possibly manage with very limited resources).

 

[Omicron]

Antice, can you explain to me by what rationale you choose either component heat vents or heat exchangers in between the overclocked vents? It looks seemingly arbitrary, but it cools really well and if I try to change it it almost always ends up worse. I've only been dealing with reactors for a day or two, it would be great if I could learn from someone who actually understands it, as opposed to me just flailing at the planner until pure chance aligns itself into a workable design

 

[Antice]

Antice, can you explain to me by what rationale you choose either component heat vents or heat exchangers in between the overclocked vents? It looks seemingly arbitrary, but it cools really well and if I try to change it it almost always ends up worse. I've only been dealing with reactors for a day or two, it would be great if I could learn from someone who actually understands it, as opposed to me just flailing at the planner until pure chance aligns itself into a workable design

flailing at the planner works.... I've been flailing at it a lot too.

But what you have to remember is that the overclocked heat vents take more heat from the reactor hull (all the heat in this design goes trough the hull) than they can remove.
that means they either need a heat exchanger to transport some of it away, or a component heat vent to prevent melting... it takes 4 component heat vents to keep a overclocked vent from ever melting. but there isn't room for that in these designs. so what you do is set up heat exchangers next to the ones that are at risk of melting to balance them out. I use the standard heat exchanger where possible, and if there is room i will also use a standard heat vent next to it to take away even more heat. (because they are cheap for their performance, but only work if a heat exchanger moves heat into them)
you don't need to use the standard heat vents tho. the heat exchangers always try to balance the heat load between attached vents and the hull, so you can use them to dump the excess heat back into the hull as well. (this is what raiju did with his design)

if you exchanged his 4 heat exchangers for component heat vent's the design would still work, because you end up with 4 component heat exchangers next to each overclocked. it actually saves on copper too that way. (that is possibly the most optimal design in terms of resources spent making it).


EDIT: fixed formatting. for some reason the font was shrinking

 

[Omicron]

Hmm... I see. That stills helps, in any case. I was wondering why the heck heat exchangers helped overclocked vents at all, so this is how it works. Geez, this is complex.

 

[Peppe]

2720 EU/t reactor with 0 heat and 0 cool down....

I'm very new to this reactor stuff but in 5 mins I had a design that output 1200 EU/t and then by the 15 min mark I had it up to 2720 EU/t... 0 Core Heat and a total output of 1,088,000,000 EU over the 5 and a half hours for its run time.

There is 0 cool down time and infinite cycles. the efficiency is only 4.86 but I think its worth it when you realize that you would need 1,088 MFSU's to hold all the power generated.

If you want to have a look at my design then here it is....
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/v3/reactorplanner.html

You solved it... except for a couple minor things...

Those pretty red and blue coolers you used aren't magic cooling fairies -- they trade heat for redstone or lapis and your design generates 7344 heat each second.

To see how much redstone and lapis you are trading for heat flip to the the condensator and replacement information section:
5285 redstone used each cycle
2353 lapis used cycle
36 thick neutron reflectors used

So if we take your safe reactor and build it in a real world... the redstone condesators will be depleted in about 6 seconds and if you take no action the explosion will then probably be 1-2 seconds later I don't think that is what the OP is looking for...

Assuming you could manage the cooling cell consumption and replacement --
To see just how much that much redstone/lapis will cost each cycle, Flip to Resources needed section:
overall profit 46%
overall efficiency 2.23

Unless you have another source for the redstone, lapis, and copper/tin/coal (quad cells + reflectors) that is very cheap then most of this would come from UU matter. Calculator estimated 3233.94 UU matter required per cycle, which is actually doable and you can run the above reactor if the basic mass fabricator from IC2 is enabled. Although being just 2.23 overall efficiency you would be better off running several traditionally cooled reactors rather than this one.

One additional issue is you used plutonium cells, which are from gregtech, which by default replaces the mass fabricator with the matter fabricator and makes UU cost 100x more -- 16.6m EU per UU. So any design that uses condensators is going to have a bad time in gregtech.

 

[Tauro]

I use this:

http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.blueyo...2upekm3euk81slp58dzequ1ls86hipxnrqpazuczfphj4

Decent output and doesn't cost any copper.

 

[Antice]

I use this:

http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.blueyo...2upekm3euk81slp58dzequ1ls86hipxnrqpazuczfphj4

Decent output and doesn't cost any copper.

It's not giving a good fuel efficiency either.
Well. nothing is limited when you have extrabees installed.
both uranium dust and copper can be had trough bees. (altho getting copper bees is easier than the radioactive ones).

 

[Tauro]

Yeah true, I just don't like to use things that don't really make sense such as bees making metals or anything similar.

 

[Rakankrad]

I decided to use Antice's design from page 2 but I've been wondering if someone can explain to me wtf I'm supposed to do with the depleted cells once it's done running.. I keep hearing about breeders but I have no idea what they are or how they work.. I've -never- messed around with nukes in the past, always prefering clean energy, but with GT, nukes really seem to be the way to go =(

 

[raiju]

I'll make this quick since it's late for me but basically a breeder refills uranium cells. You use a single cell to recharge multiple (a cheap efficient one may do about 20 per cell, an expensive one closer to 400). You use heating cells to get the temperature as high as possible (using the orange plates to increase your max heat allowance before boom) so that the uranium spreads into the depleted isotope cells as fast as possible. Imagine a reactor with:
lots of orange plates to increase the heat allowance
1 stack of X amount of heating cells, to usually 60%+ of your heat allowance (1k heat per cell)
1 uranium surrounded by depleted isotope cells. You can use thorium too for this.
A cooling system the counteract the minor heat given off by the single uranium cell.

To actually make it work, you put your depleted cells in a crafting table with coal dust to get depleted isotope cells. You then put them in this "breeder", when tehy are fully charged you put the result with coal dust again to make new uranium cells.

You can find more detailed explanations in the pages of this forum or on the IC2 forum where they have a dedicated forum section to nuclear engineering.

 

[Omicron]

And if you don't want to bother with breeding, you can centrifuge two depleted cells into one thorium cell.

 

[Abdiel]

I'll make this quick since it's late for me but basically a breeder refills uranium cells. You use a single cell to recharge multiple (a cheap efficient one may do about 20 per cell, an expensive one closer to 400).

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.

 

[raiju]

The reason you can get 400 is precisely because of thorium (I think I saw a 1000+ using dual/quad cells but I don't see the point myself)

The way it works, or at least worked back when I did it in 1.4.2 (I am aware of no changes since):
You have a depleted uranium cell
You add coal dust to make a depleted isotope cell that can be charged
You stick this in a breeder - no matter what type of cell this will refill at the same rate as far as I can tell (due to heat being given by the heating cells). This works perfectly.
You add coal to your cell and get a uranium cell back, regardless of the isotope used to charge.

To use ricks design for a breeder as an example, this thorium breeder should make 400+ uranium cells per thorium:
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.blueyo...4o9v7uswtakwf1i3pi5uqz73i9f5yu2qjluoidazmb1jq

Using your design and adding the heat exchanger I came up with this:
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.blueyo...84hg872hqxdg4y9l1r51exefpk0dgt3nkzve31hri0hkb
I imagine some of the heating has been made redundant and can be changed, but that's up to you if you're interested I am at work!

 

[Abdiel]

Both above designs show 88 cells recharged per uranium. Am I looking at a wrong number?

 

[raiju]

Both above designs show 88 cells recharged per uranium. Am I looking at a wrong number?

Yes, mouse over the yellow marked isotopes to see how many times that slot will recharge - it isn't a uranium running it so I assume that's a bug in how it works.

 

[Abdiel]

I get it now!

564 depleted cells recharged per thorium cell

Re-doing the calculations gives 12.777M EU/eff per uranium, or 89.44M EU per uranium assuming eff7 reactors and ignoring running costs.

 

[raiju]

Very nice! how do you get it to stay 85k heat though? I only know how to go up to 64k using heating cell stacks

 

[Abdiel]

The running reaction is heat-stable (produces exactly as much heat as it cools down). Therefore if you pre-heat the reactor before starting to breed, it should stay at the same temperature. The maximum 84k is obviously very risky, but doable using the reactor control mod, MiscPeripherals, or any other addon that can read reactor temperature. But even at the self-regulated temperature of 64k you still get 432 cells per thorium.

 

[MilConDoin]

Here is a cheaper version with single Thorium. It even keeps the heat below "hurt" level.
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.blueyo...ldxau63ru3avf991sxroouyfjm008eqex92pnex3s4h6o

With even more cells to recharge (dual Thorium) you can use the following (still below "hurt" level).
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.blueyo...b8k2zkrao5dgpiade6n7hp9b7964egfs9hp3czdfh6874

 

[Rakankrad]

So you need to babysit breeders or is there a way to automate it? I tend to just "fire and forget" most of my machine setups so if I need to be there to take the cells out, I'll end up losing a lot of efficiency