ReactorCraft - clever reactor setups?

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Pyure

Not Totally Useless
Aug 14, 2013
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Waterloo, Ontario
ok gents, I've managed to get a fission reactor running that uses plutonium and 4 boilers to run a regular turbine. Now I've decided to back track and see if I can get this Pebble Red reactor to work again, because in my most recent tests, I've thrown every design I had from Monster on it (I'm using revolution now), and all of em have failed. But knowing its been nerfed, this was expected. So I've tried different combinations for over an hour now, and I'm just not having any luck. Are these required to be stacked vertically now? Because that's the only thing I haven't tried, a vertical design. So does anyone have any regular 1 block high designs?

Cheers,
LC
I take it your pebble bed is a just-for-fun project at this point? Once you've achieved proper fission your pebble bed is now a bit deprecated.
 

Reika

RotaryCraft Dev
FTB Mod Dev
Sep 3, 2013
5,079
5,331
550
Toronto, Canada
sites.google.com
Perhaps Reika won't like it but if you plant 1 CO2 heat exchanger in the nether and surround it by a 5x3 of HTGRs and insulate every side of the HTGRs, you will make hot CO2. It isn't quite enough to run a LP steam turbine continuously though. I fill a drum with hot CO2 and then carry it back to my base and plug it into my ammonia setup and get insane amounts of power banked in an auroral battery.
That design sounds like it would work in the overworld as well.
 

LC14199

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
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I take it your pebble bed is a just-for-fun project at this point? Once you've achieved proper fission your pebble bed is now a bit deprecated.

The fission design was created in SSP to see what would work. It uses plutonium as I mentioned, so I'm working on a breeder reactor design, but I'm slightly more experienced with those, so it shouldn't be an issue. The pebble bed is meant to be my power kick start, after that I get into fission and breeder reactors.

And I actually forgot about ammonia for LP turbines, I need to test that, it may be what I need. I've certainly got enough ammonium chloride to make some ammonia.

@Reika is there any where I can read the mechanics of the blocks? (Apart from trying to pull apart bits from your source code). I'm basically flying blind here, and I know you dislike people just being blind followers and copying. I'd love to come up with a design myself, but I'm in the dark at the moment.
 
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Reika

RotaryCraft Dev
FTB Mod Dev
Sep 3, 2013
5,079
5,331
550
Toronto, Canada
sites.google.com
The fission design was created in SSP to see what would work. It uses plutonium as I mentioned, so I'm working on a breeder reactor design, but I'm slightly more experienced with those, so it shouldn't be an issue. The pebble bed is meant to be my power kick start, after that I get into fission and breeder reactors.

And I actually forgot about ammonia for LP turbines, I need to test that, it may be what I need. I've certainly got enough ammonium chloride to make some ammonia.

@Reika is there any where I can read the mechanics of the blocks? (Apart from trying to pull apart bits from your source code). I'm basically flying blind here, and I know you dislike people just being blind followers and copying. I'd love to come up with a design myself, but I'm in the dark at the moment.
The handbook.
 

Red3055

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
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So, I finally have the infrastructure to get into fission reactors, and I decided to use this setup as a basis for my experimentation. With a few tweaks, I think I've come up with a pretty viable alternate configuration.
View attachment 25266

This is currently powering two high-pressure turbines and two regular turbines, for a total of approximately 19 GW of power. One thing to note is that this is NOT ammonia-safe as is; I have seen boiler temperature spikes into the low 500's. However, with about 6 hours of runtime, I've seen 0 SCRAMs or meltdowns from this build. This is currently producing a small surplus of steam, but not enough to add another turbine.

Few notes: This is built in a Desert biome, ambient daytime temperature of 37 degrees. Adding two reflectors triggered a SCRAM relatively quickly; you might be able to add one, but I'm not sure it would increase output by an appreciable amount. Also, not sure if this has changed since the days of Pyure's testing, but I found it necessary to include steel blocks behind reflectors; non-reflected neutrons seemed to pass through and potentially cause radiation.

Next goal is to see if it's possible to make this ammonia-friendly while maintaining the ability to power two HT turbines, which would output almost 25 GW.

OK, trying to learn this and all the reactor stuff as i go along, without turning my base into a toxic wasteland. my question here is, for this setup, do i need to leave the white squares as air? or should i fill it with something like steel? and how about the bedrock alloy blocks for absorption around the edge. is that needed? do i need to cover everything or just the X/Z from the fuel cores?

in reguards to shielding material, what works? i heard steel, iron, concrete, bedrock alloy block... anything else? and how effective are they?
 

Red3055

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
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ok, after several hours and a couple test worlds getting the "will this break everything?" treatment I have come to the following conclusions -
1) use bedrock alloy around the the X/Z axis of the fuel cores. they only do straight line effects, so should be enough.
2) leave the squares as air. either they have no effect or placing items there has more of a cooling effect (more testing needed... perhaps iron or glass and see how that goes?)
3) concrete steel and bedrock alloy work. still not sure what else works. that may be all. that being said, per v9B (dont tell me to update, i cant, on a pub server and its up to the mod pack distro to do so) still not sure what the rate of absorbtion is. i think the 2 steel+1 BA/ rod+reflector+BA is overkill.
 

LC14199

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
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ok, after several hours and a couple test worlds getting the "will this break everything?" treatment I have come to the following conclusions -
1) use bedrock alloy around the the X/Z axis of the fuel cores. they only do straight line effects, so should be enough.
2) leave the squares as air. either they have no effect or placing items there has more of a cooling effect (more testing needed... perhaps iron or glass and see how that goes?)
3) concrete steel and bedrock alloy work. still not sure what else works. that may be all. that being said, per v9B (dont tell me to update, i cant, on a pub server and its up to the mod pack distro to do so) still not sure what the rate of absorbtion is. i think the 2 steel+1 BA/ rod+reflector+BA is overkill.

There is a bug on V9B where neutrons are not properly absorbed, and still cause environmental radiation. Please be aware of this if you're going to use a fission reactor or breeder reactor on a multiplayer server :)
 

EyeDeck

Well-Known Member
Apr 16, 2013
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Braidedheadman

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
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Filling air spaces next to boilers with anything (literally anything, in the same way that lava can be blocked with signs or ladders, etc.) acts as an insulator for that face and will slow radiant heat loss into the atmosphere from the boilers and, correspondingly, from the core. The guy who made that design might have left those spaces open to the air intentionally as a form of passive cooling. If you do plug those spaces with anything, keep an eye on your temperatures, especially if you've built that reactor in a desert as he did.

Just to elaborate on EyeDeck's link in case it's not clear what's happening, different materials have different rates of neutron absorption, where concrete has one of the lowest rates and bedrock alloy (BRA) has the highest (97.5% per block). Note that there is no block that provides fully 100% absorption. This is the reason that people stack shield blocks, even when using expensive BRA blocks; they are nudging the percent rate of absorption so that it approaches 100% (ie: a single BRA block captures all but an average of 2.5 out of 100 neutrons that escape into the environment and, of the 2.5% of neutrons that do escape, a second block would capture a further 97.5% of those, and so on).

Unless you don't care much about your surrounding environment, and believe me, given the right conditions, some really scary shit can happen if you don't; you'll really want to stack your radiation shield layers with the best materials that you can afford. Many people feel comfortable with a shield layer three blocks deep with BRA. Other materials may require more bulk depending on how you feel about irradiating your surroundings.
 
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Red3055

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
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Thanks all for the info. its been helpful for sure. And yea i got the shielding thing and how it works (staring at pg 1000 io have been reading through the main thread... on pg 1110 or so XD) was just looking at percentages though :)

On that topic, i have yet to get a PBR to work at all. is there a thread for them? or any ideas? in creative i have tried a ton of things and thus far it totally has not worked at all.
 

Rewyn

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
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Thanks all for the info. its been helpful for sure. And yea i got the shielding thing and how it works (staring at pg 1000 io have been reading through the main thread... on pg 1110 or so XD) was just looking at percentages though :)

On that topic, i have yet to get a PBR to work at all. is there a thread for them? or any ideas? in creative i have tried a ton of things and thus far it totally has not worked at all.
What did you try? They are a tad different from the others (afaik), as in they are meant to be stacked. Also the cores should surround the co2 heat exchanger, not the other way around.
A simple (very simple, and probably terrible inefficient, but usually working for me) design would be 4 layers of co2 heat exchanger, with 4 layers of cores on each side, resulting in 16 cores and 4 heat exchanger.
No idea how much turbines I had running with that, though. Shouldn't be all that much. :p
 

Red3055

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
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What did you try? They are a tad different from the others (afaik), as in they are meant to be stacked. Also the cores should surround the co2 heat exchanger, not the other way around.
A simple (very simple, and probably terrible inefficient, but usually working for me) design would be 4 layers of co2 heat exchanger, with 4 layers of cores on each side, resulting in 16 cores and 4 heat exchanger.
No idea how much turbines I had running with that, though. Shouldn't be all that much. :p

Mind you, I'm a bit behind in v9B - but thusfar i have done the following patterns

#1
Pc

#2
PP
PPC

#3
PPP
PCP
PPP

#4
PPP
PPP
PPPC


of course, they have been isolated on all sides. I did each style in 1y, 2y, 4y, and 6y deep configurations. Thus far #2 at a 6y has yielded the best results (1 heat exchange to about 5 steam boilers just barely drains hot co2)
 
E

Eugene5348

Guest
Just Put the Irridation chambers in your fusion reactor. Decreases power slightly but make your tritium without the use of other reactors
 

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EyeDeck

Well-Known Member
Apr 16, 2013
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Just Put the Irridation chambers in your fusion reactor. Decreases power slightly but make your tritium without the use of other reactors
Yep, but you only really need like 4 chambers to self-sustain, possibly fewer.
 
E

Eugene5348

Guest
Ehhh Im trying to fill up my tanks so i can stop detritium and tritium production
 

Rewyn

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
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Mind you, I'm a bit behind in v9B - but thusfar i have done the following patterns

#1
Pc

#2
PP
PPC

#3
PPP
PCP
PPP

#4
PPP
PPP
PPPC


of course, they have been isolated on all sides. I did each style in 1y, 2y, 4y, and 6y deep configurations. Thus far #2 at a 6y has yielded the best results (1 heat exchange to about 5 steam boilers just barely drains hot co2)

Wait, what are we talking about?
I meant using a single co2 heat exchanger surrounded by 4 pebble bed reactor cores on each side, 4 layers high. From there, using a single heat exchanger with a single steam boiler.
Maybe it's also due to your water supply? I had it multiple times, that my steam boiler just didn't get enough water, to make steam out of it, hence didn't use up the hot co2.

Edit: While a single heat exchanger+steam boiler is enough to run at least 1 turbine, it's probably not the most efficient. :p
 

Red3055

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
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Wait, what are we talking about?
I meant using a single co2 heat exchanger surrounded by 4 pebble bed reactor cores on each side, 4 layers high. From there, using a single heat exchanger with a single steam boiler.
Maybe it's also due to your water supply? I had it multiple times, that my steam boiler just didn't get enough water, to make steam out of it, hence didn't use up the hot co2.

Edit: While a single heat exchanger+steam boiler is enough to run at least 1 turbine, it's probably not the most efficient. :p

pebble bed + co2. that's the different patters i have tried, at varying layers (1 layer, 2 layer, 4 layers and 6 layers) ..... what i was looking for was only a setup that was efficient enough to heat the co2 up constatntly (i need a high enough output to feed a turbine without a reactor :/ ). in the end it was the 4 pebble beds with 6 layers that worked the best. this was done without any steam boilers at all.
 

Rewyn

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
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i need a high enough output to feed a turbine without a reactor :/
Uhm, what do you mean? That IS a reactor, or do you mean, produce enough to save up steam, so when your reactor doesnt run you can still startup the turbine?
Maybe some screens would help, I'll try to make a basic example later on, if I remember to do so..
 

Red3055

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
15
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Uhm, what do you mean? That IS a reactor, or do you mean, produce enough to save up steam, so when your reactor doesnt run you can still startup the turbine?
Maybe some screens would help, I'll try to make a basic example later on, if I remember to do so..
no reactors that can irradiate the area. The issue is more trying to build a large enough seup that i can run the HP-turbine off off a HTGR setup. What i have seen thusfar is i will need to make 4-5 PBR setups and feed 4-5 heat exchanges. each exchange can do 4-5 boilers. so provided i can keep up with the water (shouldn't be an issue) then i should be able to get it running and keep it running.

Is there on/off valves for the steam line by any chance? i would assume there is but i have not found them thus far in my searches through the book or NEI
 

EyeDeck

Well-Known Member
Apr 16, 2013
236
87
54
The issue is more trying to build a large enough seup that i can run the HP-turbine off off a HTGR setup.
Can't be done, Reactorcraft steam is flagged with the reactor type that produced it (fission, htgr, fusion etc), and the HPT is deliberately coded not to work with HTGR steam.