Nuclear Reactors.. suck

[McyD]

I prefer one that won't blow up, and doesn't need part replaced, so I only run mark 1's that I don't have to worry about it and the best I have found is the one I posted for total eu/t at no heat generation.

 

[Harvest88]

Yea I'm after a good plutonium single cells reactor with reflectors all around them and cooled with the HVC method using Overclocked Heat Vents and putting them into "cooling reactors" to cool them down and then replace them and the cycle repeat so I can get a higher eu/t and 0 running cost unlike those quad uranium cells. I don't even have extra copper to burn for those anyway.

 

[LittleMike]

VANtheSven: check your math, the GregTech matter fabricator on default settings needs 100 times (two digits) the energy of the regular IC2 mass fab, not 10.

Warnipple: your problem is that you are playing in a GregTech environment, but you're not using GregTech to build your reactor. The mod adds quite a few options for highly efficient designs. Here's one of the best.

- Will breed its own fuel after initial startup
- Comparable EU/t, five times the total EU output per cycle of yours
- Cost per cycle: 5 uranium, 20 copper, 40 coal dust. Your current design: 24 uranium, 96 copper, 0 coal dust

I have a question regarding this - is it what you call a "hybrid" reactor? Also, when you say it breeds it's own fuel, does that mean it doesn't require any upkeep at all? I'm so nuke ignorant and I've had trouble finding information about whether or not these are set and forget or if you need to feed it copper or something. The IC2 forums just confuse me with too much information - breeder reactors, thorium ones, performance gains when they get hotter, but don't get them too hot, etc. I think the terminology throws me too.

 

[Omicron]

I thought that Throium is the only thing changing the lifespan to only half then what's is now. So how is the plutonium is going to change too?

Plutonium cells are supposedly going to pulse twice per reactor tick. This can mean any number of ticks, up to twice as much power and heat. That alone might make any existing hybrid reactor design invalid. But I trust that the intrepid people over at the IC2 nuclear engineering forum will figure something out once we have a stable 1.5.1 release.

I have a question regarding this - is it what you call a "hybrid" reactor? Also, when you say it breeds it's own fuel, does that mean it doesn't require any upkeep at all? I'm so nuke ignorant and I've had trouble finding information about whether or not these are set and forget or if you need to feed it copper or something. The IC2 forums just confuse me with too much information - breeder reactors, thorium ones, performance gains when they get hotter, but don't get them too hot, etc. I think the terminology throws me too.

Yeah, "hybrid reactor" refers to a reactor which is fueled by a grid of alternating thorium and plutonium cells. All types of fuel cells generate extra pulses (and therefore extra energy) when they are next to another fuel cell, but thorium and plutonium next to each other do this more than any other kind of cell - they kind of snowball off of each other. That's where the crazy efficiency score of 9.175 comes from (even though the IC2 reactor planner can't calculate it correctly).

Also interesting is the fact that the primary methods for producing thorium and plutonium are recipes which return both of them, in a 4:1 ratio. So a hybrid reactor that uses 1 plutonium cell for every 4 thorium cells is called "thorium neutral" because it neither produces a surplus of thorium nor does it consume extra. There are unbalanced designs as well, but the one I linked is such a neutral reactor. It has 5 quad thorium cells (= 20 thorium cells), and two single plutonium cells that need to be replaced an average of 2.5 times per cycle (= 5 plutonium cells). And 20:5 equals 4:1 exactly.

It breeds its own fuel by using one of the aforementioned plutonium production methods. Step one: craft 1 uranium ingot and 8 tin cells into 8 near-depleted uranium cells. Step two: combine each of them with coal dust to create 8 depleted isotope cells. Insert these cells into the breeding slot of the reactor, and they will be recharged (for free) by the adjacent fuel cells, netting you 8 re-enriched isotope cells. You can now insert these 8 into an industrial centrifuge, which will spit out 1 plutonium cell, 4 thorium cells, and 3 near-depleted uranium cells (which you can feed back into the breeding loop). As such, even the 5 uranium per cycle assessment I made above is incorrect; it's actually just 3.125 uranium per cycle, factoring in the returns from the centrifuge.

Think about that for a moment: 3.125 uranium for 367,000,000 EU. Close to 117.5 million per uranium. This is a combination of the aforementioned high efficiency, and fact that you are using a breeder as an uranium multiplier. Even uranium reactors can get 8 times as much output out of each uranium if they rely on a breeder, but then again, most uranium reactors can't breed by themselves, so they need an extra second reactor to be the breeder. Thorium is very good at breeding, on the other hand, which is why the "hybreeder" works so handily. And you don't need to worry about the temperature either - it is designed to hit exactly that 16k heat mark and will never go above it. Having a decent heat level makes it breed faster, you see.

To calculate your reactor's efficiency, look at its total EU yield for one cycle, and then look at what kind of fuel cells you are using. Thorium and uranium are worth 1 million per efficiency, plutonium is 4 million per efficiency. For example, the reactor MycD linked on the previous page uses four quad uranium cells (= 16 uranium cells) to generate 64 million EU. Total up the value of the fuel cells (16 * 1 million = 16 million), and divide the total energy yield by that value: 64 million / 16 million = 4. That's your efficiency number.

For the hybrid reactor, we have 5 quad thorium cells and 2x 2.5 plutonium cells per cycle: (5 * 4 * 1 million) + (2 * 2.5 * 4 million) = 40 million, and it generates 367 million EU. Thus 367 million / 40 million = 9.175 for efficiency.

Hope that little "crash course" wasn't too confusing, nuclear reactors are kind of a minigame by themselves

 

[LittleMike]

I do understand a bit better, thank you. I think I'll have to play in Creative so I have a visual on what you're describing as well. So related question, then - you need to manually craft the fuel sources and do the centrifuging, correct? So it's "free" energy in that the waste products are used to create the fuel products, but it's not an automated system. Is that correct? Or did I miss something somewhere?

 

[McyD]

there are ways to tie in automation, but it would be harder to setup with a hybrid as you have more than one cell type to replace, and have to account for the processing time in the centrifuge/travel time/etc or some sort of retriever/filter/manager setup to detect the cell type and manage it so that no more than 1 type is out of the system at once. Usually if all the reactor slots are completely full you can pipe into and out of the system as the cells are depleted to keep it going since they can only drop in the open slots.

Thinking about it the best way would probably to have 2 sets of cells so that a spare is always ready to go while the 1st set is processing, this would lead to no down time for the reactor.

 

[Omicron]

A key part of automating it is the GregTech advanced regulator. It's a device that can insert into 9 specific slots in a target inventory, meaning you can have it replace exactly the slot that gets consumed, no matter whether it is an isotope cell, a plutonium cell or a thorium cell. Obviously only works for reactors that only have 9 or less components to replace

And then you just need to make sure you handle the autocrafting in some way (AE works well, obviously, but you could also do it with crafty turtles or Buildcraft autocrafting tables or Xycraft fabricators) and find a way to keep the 9-slot buffer inventory of the advanced regulator from filling up with only one type of cell. Railcraft advanced item unloaders have proven to be useful for this.

http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/thr...to-power-matter-fabricator.16327/#post-186188

 

[Skyguy987]

If you want a good Ic2 reactor design then check this one out. Mark 1, 420 eu/t.
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.blueyo...hz1wpiyjp8vtdslza80m00drdsvntps8fdm4xmr3ydlhc