ReactorCraft Fission Reactor Designs

[Demosthenex]

Pardon the new thread, but the prior one was offtrack with discussions on fusion, survival, updates, and other thing I felt were offtopic to reactor design.

I'm experimenting to find good reactor designs for fission where the first criteria is safety given I play a shared survival world, the second is power output.

To that effect I've been experimenting with "dry" reactors in creative, which are relying on block to block heat transfer and radiant heat to air for cooling.

My initial thought was if I could find a design well balanced for heat, then when the pipes and active cooling were added and a few control rods in place it would be safer than a design that had only been tested with active cooling.

So far, these reactors have not melted with a full load of fuel pellets, no piping, water, or active cooling at all in my creatives tests in version 23c (Monster 1.1.2).

Several new questions came up along the way.

Boilers can stack vertically, and appear to be multiblock. Does this provide additional heat transfer or heat sink? They appear to (slowly) share water and output steam from the top.

I haven't been able to nail down how much heat transfers from boiler to boiler, though the rate of transfer for reactor to boiler is 1/4 the difference in their temperatures. It seems that additional boilers help draw away high heat and are useful.

Lastly other than creating rows of turbines, does anyone know a good way to test the actual useful output of a reactor?

Here's to a fruitful discussion for all!

 

[Demosthenex]

Another few questions that came up:

What is the chance that a neutron entering a core will react with it instead of just passing through? Contrete has 20% likelihood of intercepting a neutron, a steel block has 90%, what's the chance of the core with fuel?

Also how much of a temperature increase is expected in a single reaction? An incoming neutron hits the core, spawns three new ones, and makes how much heat?

 

[madnewmy]

Reika gave me is 21 core fission core reactor (was for tritium) and worked perfectly for me

http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/threads/reactorcraft-tritium.46391/#post-661606

One quadrant outputted around 6.6 GW but that didn't seem to be the max.

For calculating output, you could calculate your steam production (10 steam/tick is one turbine or 900-950 MW) and you can calculate the heat but I don't remember by hearth

 

[Demosthenex]

I'd say it's progress, but I had 17 in a larger design.

 

[Demosthenex]

Exciting! It looks like there is significant potential for expanding reactors vertically.

I do wonder how the control rods would work in a tight space without vertical clearance.

Both of these survived, with the layer illustrated stacked 3 tall, completely dry and did not overheat.

 

[Demosthenex]

From the stacked testing I created two reactors in creative mode with active cooling and turbines, but no control rods. They seem cool enough this isn't required. OTOH, they will overheat if all water stops. Not sure if anyone has a design yet that guards against water loss instead of just too active a reaction.

https://imgur.com/a/VBVZ7

https://imgur.com/a/sanGh

 

[trajing]

For maximizing power output of any reactor, use neutron reflectors.

 

[Demosthenex]

Most of those are surrounded by reflectors. Was there some place specific you meant?

My understanding was that the neutrons only go in straight lines from the cores, so the reflectors are lined up to them.

 

[Demosthenex]

Another note, the second boiler made with inline cores can support ONE HP turbine at 7.1GW.

This starts a new question of how much energy per core would you expect?

This inline boiler could be said to have a rating of 0.295 GW/core with 24 cores (~300 MW/core).

 

[Demosthenex]

I think I've found a more reliable way to measure the output.

I setup a clutch connected to a bedrock industrial coil and a ComputerCraft computer. I had a simple program emit redstone for 1 hour (3600 seconds), and then I measured the TJ accrued in the coil.

Boiler1 = 15.752 TJ / hr = 4.47 GJ/s
Boiler2 = 20.981 TJ / hr = 5.96 GJ/s

I also was running a test to see for a specific reactor layout if more or less boilers produced more energy (ie: was more boilers more efficient?). The run I did for a small 6 core reactor pair, one with 3 boilers, the other with 12 boilers, showed that the reactor with more boilers was slightly more efficient (153 TJ vs 164 TJ). Each of the reactors had the same core layout, just additional boilers between the core and the reflectors.

 

[Reika]

*watches intently*

 

[Kirameki]

Here's something you can try that I've been experimenting with lately - heat will transfer across boilers vertically. You can build a T structure to make room for pipes underneath and above while still keeping the heat transfer capabilities. I haven't yet tried it directly on top of a reactor block because pipes, but I'm building my fusion reactor to try to take advantage of this mechanic.

 

[Demosthenex]

Here's something you can try that I've been experimenting with lately - heat will transfer across boilers vertically. You can build a T structure to make room for pipes underneath and above while still keeping the heat transfer capabilities. I haven't yet tried it directly on top of a reactor block because pipes, but I'm building my fusion reactor to try to take advantage of this mechanic.

I did notice that! I tried making a 21 tall boiler with a ring of 8 cores around it. It didn't go well. Passive heat rose through the units very quickly!

When I started trying to use it for steam, it broke down.

Steam appeared to output at the top at the right speed, and the heat transferred fine. The break point was the water input at the bottom very slowly transferred up the structure.

Instead of treating it as one large boiler and adding together the tanks, it acted like a stack of single boilers with individual tanks. They transferred fluid between them slowly, perhaps less than a bucket per second. So it couldn't pull enough water to be an effective method to create steam.

 

[Kirameki]

I did notice that! I tried making a 21 tall boiler with a ring of 8 cores around it. It didn't go well. Passive heat rose through the units very quickly!

When I started trying to use it for steam, it broke down.

Steam appeared to output at the top at the right speed, and the heat transferred fine. The break point was the water input at the bottom very slowly transferred up the structure.

Instead of treating it as one large boiler and adding together the tanks, it acted like a stack of single boilers with individual tanks. They transferred fluid between them slowly, perhaps less than a bucket per second. So it couldn't pull enough water to be an effective method to create steam.

Interesting...In my case I created a stack of 4 boilers with two "arms", basically two boilers attached to the top of the stack. The base boiler was adjacent to a heat exchanger. I only pumped water into the arms, not the base - that seemed to work fine as it pulled all the heat from the base boiler up to the top and generated steam from the two with water inputs.
I suppose as long as the stack(s) remain below the melt threshold you could concentrate reactors around the stack bases and draw heat up into a sort of umbrella structure.

 

[Demosthenex]

Another treat, full diagram and resource requirements for a High Pressure Turbine. This is my updated version from mykepwnage's post on reddit. Many kudos to him for the layout, given how much I hate videos.

 

[madnewmy]

Another treat, full diagram and resource requirements for a High Pressure Turbine. This is my updated version from mykepwnage's post on reddit. Many kudos to him for the layout, given how much I hate videos.

View attachment 11744

Reika did it on his official forum post but this one is so much better now I would love one for the turbine generator (i think that's the name :O)

 

[Demosthenex]

Reika did it on his official forum post but this one is so much better now I would love one for the turbine generator (i think that's the name :O)

Could you grace us with a link to that post? I had a hard time finding it initially.

 

[madnewmy]

http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic...ization-and-more/page__st__7680#entry30798041

 

[Demosthenex]

I think that's the RF generator, not the HP turbine.

 

[Padfoote]

Another treat, full diagram and resource requirements for a High Pressure Turbine. This is my updated version from mykepwnage's post on reddit. Many kudos to him for the layout, given how much I hate videos.

That will be extremely useful. Thanks for putting this together, it makes more sense than some in-game screenshots to me.