ReactorCraft - clever reactor setups?

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Reika

RotaryCraft Dev
FTB Mod Dev
Sep 3, 2013
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I forgot you were a programmer. I shoulda remembered that and not spouted off basic debugging protocol :/

I don't recall the specifics, but Reika has in the past highly recommended against using ItemDucts (specifically) for handling waste.

Personally, I find the waste system unnecessarily punishing and highly not-fun. If I were still playing the mod I'd push hard for some changes in this area.
As of v25, waste decays faster and accumulates slower, which should help.
 

Pyure

Not Totally Useless
Aug 14, 2013
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As of v25, waste decays faster and accumulates slower, which should help.
This is probably a stupid (Y/N) question, but does your waste decay at a pace directly proportionate to its actual half-life? For obvious reasons its not going to be tethered 1:1 to that half-life.

Somewhat less-stupid question, and one I hear now and then: do you already have mouse-over information that tells a player (without looking at documentation) whether a waste product belongs in one storage container or the other? You've explained in the past which specific duration constitutes long-lived-waste, but I already forget that exact figure (2.x years?) and would have to look it up again before using the storage mechanism. A notion I saw floated around a few weeks ago was adding "S" or "L" for short/long-lived waste. This may be brutally out of date.
 

Reika

RotaryCraft Dev
FTB Mod Dev
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Toronto, Canada
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This is probably a stupid (Y/N) question, but does your waste decay at a pace directly proportionate to its actual half-life? For obvious reasons its not going to be tethered 1:1 to that half-life.
Yes, it is.


Somewhat less-stupid question, and one I hear now and then: do you already have mouse-over information that tells a player (without looking at documentation) whether a waste product belongs in one storage container or the other? You've explained in the past which specific duration constitutes long-lived-waste, but I already forget that exact figure (2.x years?) and would have to look it up again before using the storage mechanism. A notion I saw floated around a few weeks ago was adding "S" or "L" for short/long-lived waste. This may be brutally out of date.
The cutoff is one year. I can add a note to the handbook.[/quote]
 
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Demosthenex

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Jul 29, 2019
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@Reika: Regarding the waste containers, I had noticed that Opis said the chunk they are in was rather active. How frequently do they update their content and temperature? Would a lag in TPS cause them to catchup suddenly and fry?
 

Manni

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Jul 29, 2019
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Hi first of all thank you so much for the awsome mods you make i really enjoy them alot.

But i got around to trying to make a fusion reactor and to test it i made one in a test world but i get this issue. where plasma just spews out of the injectors and is never bend by the solenoid. I have tried every "fix" i could find on the internet and i saw your video and tried the break solenoid fix allso. im using the FTB monster pack but i have updated to the latest version of all your mods. could anyone maybe give me an idea where to look for the error
This is the picture of the error https://www.dropbox.com/s/bas6lbxsty3l1pj/fusion reactor.jpg
i have the saved world in zip format here https://www.dropbox.com/s/zxn3vh2eyhddk2o/New World-.rar
and the configs here https://www.dropbox.com/s/iawehxbyoddasgd/config.rar

Thank you in advance
 

trajing

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
3,091
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Hi first of all thank you so much for the awsome mods you make i really enjoy them alot.

But i got around to trying to make a fusion reactor and to test it i made one in a test world but i get this issue. where plasma just spews out of the injectors and is never bend by the solenoid. I have tried every "fix" i could find on the internet and i saw your video and tried the break solenoid fix allso. im using the FTB monster pack but i have updated to the latest version of all your mods. could anyone maybe give me an idea where to look for the error
This is the picture of the error https://www.dropbox.com/s/bas6lbxsty3l1pj/fusion reactor.jpg
i have the saved world in zip format here https://www.dropbox.com/s/zxn3vh2eyhddk2o/New World-.rar
and the configs here https://www.dropbox.com/s/iawehxbyoddasgd/config.rar

Thank you in advance
Are you using vandegraffs? Is the solenoid spinning?
 

Demosthenex

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Jul 29, 2019
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Once per second.


No, because everything slows equally.

Then I have no explanation why two well separated and completely submerged containers both exploded while one was full and the other only about 60% after a few hours. The waste was hand placed, no new incoming.

We run MCPC, so please don't consider this a bug in ReC. It's likely a MCPC interaction issue. It worked for me in single player creative, which is very frustrating.

Unfortunately for server stability I'm going to have to use a trashcan, the entity count killed it two times while I was trying to fix it and I'm not going to crash it again.

Thanks.
 

Manni

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
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Are you using vandegraffs? Is the solenoid spinning?

Hi thank you for trying to help. Yes i am using van de graff's i have had up to 5 of them running with like reika said in his tutorial a jetengines worth of power. when i took the picture i had 2 running one on each side of the ring
 

Ieldra

Popular Member
Apr 25, 2014
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I feel stupid, but can anyone here tell me how to use the fluid compression chamber? I want to make more Deuterium and Tritium and storing fluids in the kilobuckets range in Extra Cells gets expensive. I thought it would work like this: give it power and pump the liquid/gas in. However, that does not appear to work. I tried pumping in from the side and the top (using a fluid export bus), and varied torque between 1kNm and 8kNm. The handbook says gases can be compressed with less torque so I figured varying beween 1kNM (minimum torque, I'd say this should work for gases) and 8 kNM would be enough.
 

Manni

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
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Hi thank you for trying to help. Yes i am using van de graff's i have had up to 5 of them running with like reika said in his tutorial a jetengines worth of power. when i took the picture i had 2 running one on each side of the ring

i found the error the magnet was placed to low *blush*
 

malicious_bloke

Over-Achiever
Jul 28, 2013
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So, my initial test setup for a fission reactor:

2014-07-19_13.47.53.png

I built it in a test world just to make sure it's not going to catastrophically explode in my legit world and take my very pretty base with it.

Seems stable enough, the core in the middle hovers around 125-130 degrees, that's not troublesome is it?

Also seems like I'm producing too much steam for one turbine to use by itself. What does one recommend here? Extra steam grates to run more turbines in parallel or that trick Danilus did in one of his vids where he chained them and used the waste steam from one turbine to run another above and behind it.

Any tips to make the whole thing more efficient would be gratefully received :D
 

Padfoote

Brick Thrower
Forum Moderator
Dec 11, 2013
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So, my initial test setup for a fission reactor:

View attachment 12078

I built it in a test world just to make sure it's not going to catastrophically explode in my legit world and take my very pretty base with it.

Seems stable enough, the core in the middle hovers around 125-130 degrees, that's not troublesome is it?

Also seems like I'm producing too much steam for one turbine to use by itself. What does one recommend here? Extra steam grates to run more turbines in parallel or that trick Danilus did in one of his vids where he chained them and used the waste steam from one turbine to run another above and behind it.

Any tips to make the whole thing more efficient would be gratefully received :D

More turbines. IIRC Reika fixed the turbine chaining. Could be wrong though.
 
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Demosthenex

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So, my initial test setup for a fission reactor:

View attachment 12078

I built it in a test world just to make sure it's not going to catastrophically explode in my legit world and take my very pretty base with it.

Seems stable enough, the core in the middle hovers around 125-130 degrees, that's not troublesome is it?

Also seems like I'm producing too much steam for one turbine to use by itself. What does one recommend here? Extra steam grates to run more turbines in parallel or that trick Danilus did in one of his vids where he chained them and used the waste steam from one turbine to run another above and behind it.

Any tips to make the whole thing more efficient would be gratefully received :D

You should be able to place multiple steam grates down the line and have turbines above them.

By using concrete as a liner instead of neutron reflectors you are lowering the efficiency. With reflectors 25% of the neutrons will reflect back into the reactor to create more energy.

Concrete doesn't completely block neutrons either. You should put up two steel blocks (90% blocking each), reflectors, or a combination of the two.

There's a whole thread I've run on fission reactor designs you may be interested in at:
http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/threads/reactorcraft-fission-reactor-designs.47199
 

malicious_bloke

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Jul 28, 2013
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Cheers, looks like a lot of useful info in there.

Will reflecting neutrons back into the reactor heat things up enough that I need control rods or can I just permarun it as is?
 

Demosthenex

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Jul 29, 2019
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Will reflecting neutrons back into the reactor heat things up enough that I need control rods or can I just permarun it as is?

The way reactors work is an emergent behavior. Adding reflectors will increase the total energy in the system and add heat. I couldn't say how much.

Regarding control rods I have yet to experiment with them much. They essentially are an powered togglable neutron absorber, but their incorporation increases reactor size greatly.

In the beginning I would recommend you create a very redundant water supply and use a cooler reactor like the ones I tested with passive cooling. Later if you decide to make a hot reactor perhaps use the rods, but in my experience an overheating hot reactor overheats so fast the rods fail to deploy.
 

Padfoote

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Dec 11, 2013
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Cheers, looks like a lot of useful info in there.

Will reflecting neutrons back into the reactor heat things up enough that I need control rods or can I just permarun it as is?

I think you'll be fine since the middle core is around 130C, but you'll want to test it first. The reflectors may be enough to push it to dangerous levels.
 

Demosthenex

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Jul 29, 2019
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I think you'll be fine since the middle core is around 130C, but you'll want to test it first. The reflectors may be enough to push it to dangerous levels.

4 sides x 25% = 100% increase in total neutron traffic.

The constraint will be water input. I would classify that as hot, I don't believe it would survive without active cooling (ie: water).

In my notes I could get an eight core ring to stabilize in a cool configuration, but a full 9 in a 3x3 arrangement required two layers of boilers to be cool enough to survive.

That's not a bad thing, more boilers can reduce the required water input per boiler. Water throughput is a major issue. The downside is more boilers can also reduce efficiency.
 
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Demosthenex

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Let me clarify my description of a hot vs cool reactor.

I tested configurations without any active cooling because the boilers will exchange heat with air at a lesser rate than water. If I could find a configuration where the heat distribution was sufficient to survive only passive air cooling, it should perform in a stable manner when actively cooled.

My definition of a cool reactor is a configuration where a flat reactor without any piping and with boilers and cores open to air, such that the reactor cores do not overheat with a full fuel load is used and left to bake for an extended interval (ie: until accumulated waste cools the reaction).

I define a hot reactor as one which would fail the air cooling test but may work with active water cooling.

A hot reactor will have higher efficiency and performance, but is more dangerous (ie: quickly goes out of control) and is more dependent on the quality of the cooling system. Water production and throughput bottlenecks are a real concern.

A cool reactor should be more stable overall as it should respond more slowly to changes in cooling. This does not mean it doesn't need cooling. A functioning system required piping to the cores and boilers which function as insulators and prevent any air cooling. The air cooling is a test method for optimizing heat distribution only, not a method for production use.
 

Reika

RotaryCraft Dev
FTB Mod Dev
Sep 3, 2013
5,079
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550
Toronto, Canada
sites.google.com
More turbines. IIRC Reika fixed the turbine chaining. Could be wrong though.
I fixed that back in v14, as the comments of that video say. Now you also know why I am leery of out-of-date YT videos.

I feel stupid, but can anyone here tell me how to use the fluid compression chamber? I want to make more Deuterium and Tritium and storing fluids in the kilobuckets range in Extra Cells gets expensive. I thought it would work like this: give it power and pump the liquid/gas in. However, that does not appear to work. I tried pumping in from the side and the top (using a fluid export bus), and varied torque between 1kNm and 8kNm. The handbook says gases can be compressed with less torque so I figured varying beween 1kNM (minimum torque, I'd say this should work for gases) and 8 kNM would be enough.
Capacity is a function of torque; you need far more if you want to store more than a few bucket. Fluid input is horizontal, and fluids can be drawn out the top.
 
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