[ReactorCraft] Thorium Fuel Pellets?

[ChemE]

I am playing RoC (v7f)/ReC (v7f) on a small private server and have finally gotten around to attempting to build my first reactor. I've not yet had very much luck getting a HTGR hot enough to produce more than a tiny trickle of hot carbon dioxide gas so I decided to play with thorium instead since thorite ore spawns all over the nether. When extracted and smelted I get thorium ingots which make basically nothing of use as far as I can tell. Is thorium still a work in progress, deprecated, or am I just not seeing something in NEI and the ReC in-game book?

 

[Plasmasnake]

Thorium is going to be used in a new type of reactor in some unspecified later version of ReactorCraft. I assume that thorium was implemented and obtainable now so you can stockpile it for later.

There is some discussion about it on the RotaryCraft Suggestions thread if you are interested.

 

[ScorpioOld]

I've not yet had very much luck getting a HTGR hot enough to produce more than a tiny trickle of hot carbon dioxide gas

You can try to build reactor close to bedrock where temperature is very close to 100 degree. Also you need to surround one boiler tower with 8 pebble towers of cores and do not forget to surround all construction with concrete to prevent losses of heat.

I found the simplest way is to build uranium reactor, which directly produces steam. 7 fuel cores in row and 7 boilers rows from each side surrounded by neutron reflectors. Two of such can easily run High power turbine.

 

[ChemE]

So far I've tested (single layer only) 1 CO2 HEX surrounded by 8 pebble beds full of fresh triso fuel pellets in the desert during the day at y-level 5 with every face of the heat exchanger and pebble beds surrounded by covers or strips which I've read count as full blocks and thus thermal insulation. The heat exchanger hovers around 780C but never makes hot CO2. I've also tried the following setup in a 25C ambient environment:

PPP
PHP
PPP
PPP

where P = pebble bed and H = heat exchanger and it never gets hotter than 750C. I know Reika chastised people for not building bigger so I'm adding cores as I get resources in hopes of making some hot CO2. Do you happen to know if a) a single layer is possible b) how large a single layer needs to be to actually generate hot CO2?


EDIT: This setup works almost too well. Adding one little asymmetric pebble bed fuel core made all the difference in the world.

PPP
PHP
PPPP
PPP

 

[Pyure]

As per my usual policy on discussions regarding ReactorCraft, I'm sending a courtesy page to @Demosthenex whom I consider an authority on the subject.

 

[ChemE]

Strange, clearly there is at least one mechanic that I still don't understand. The above 3x4 setup did heat up enough to generate a bit of steam and get a 5 stage turbine up to 60MW before cooling all the way back down to 700C for 15 minutes and doing nothing. There must be a random chance every so often of a triso pellet ticking and giving off heat. I seem to have few enough cores that getting a stretch of good luck and pushing the heat exchanger above 800C is rare and not sustainable.

I hope these didn't get nerfed so hard that the sustainable number of pebble beds takes a vast amount of triso pellets every hour such that the whole thing isn't worth it. Knowing Reika it probably is still rewarding but every core I add just worsens my overall fuel performance.

 

[Pyure]

I won't be surprised if that's intentional in order to provide an incentive to upgrade to legitimate fission.

 

[ChemE]

I won't be surprised if that's intentional in order to provide an incentive to upgrade to legitimate fission.

I saw him mention on a different thread that he did nerf the HTGR heat output to preclude people abusing them which is understandable. However, I would assume that he does still intend for them to be a legitimate rung on the ReC ladder so I want to make it work before progressing to the next most complex setup. I thought that HTGRs were meant to be entry level noob reactors.

 

[Pyure]

Yep, agreed

 

[ChemE]

Okay, I'm probably still doing something wrong but can't work out what. I'm producing a steady stream of steam now using my edited single layer design shown above. Steam is being generated by 6 steam boilers surrounding a heat exchanger all of which are hovering around 700C and a pump powered by a dc electric motor (I know uber weak) and recycling the condensate is barely keeping any water in the boilers. Where is the water/steam going? It is building up in the steam lines which are short a lead to the bottom of the steam grate. Now for the very odd: 1 steam grate placed 2 blocks beneath the small end of the turbine (meaning two air blocks between) won't get the torque higher than 4.8kNm. I thought 1 steam grate was enough to max a turbine.

EDIT: Using the angular transducer on the four smallest turbine sections reports 950MW. The largest block consistently reports 313 MW using the angular transducer and the shaft and dynamo coming out of the turbine also report 313MW.

 

[RavynousHunter]

Is one of your turbine sections damaged? I know that I accidentally flew into one of mine, and the power output dropped dramatically.

 

[ChemE]

Is one of your turbine sections damaged? I know that I accidentally flew into one of mine, and the power output dropped dramatically.

I've bumped into that last section twice in fact. Now that you mention it, of course it makes perfect sense that that is the cause. I'll replace that section and update this thread but I bet that fixes it outright. Many thanks!

EDIT: Thanks again RavynousHunter! That was in fact the problem. I didn't realize that some of the blades had sheared off the last section but once I replaced it with a new one I noticed that the render had changed to reflect my walking into it.

 

[RavynousHunter]

Not a problem!

 

[JohnOC]

I'm having much better results with 12 pebble bed cores around a single CO2 heat exchanger in a diamond pattern. It runs a single LP turbine at continuous full output, with a slow build-up over time of steam volume in the line from the 3 steam boilers to the steam grate.

 

[ChemE]

I am still in the process of chunk loading and stitching everything together since I'm doing everything on my survival server but I am getting a nice stream of hot CO2 from 7 pebble bed fuel cores surrounding a single CO2 heat exchanger all parked in the nether (don't bother trying a boiler there though! ). I wrapped the 3x3 on the sides with inventory cable from SFM, covered the bottom with covers, and the top with strips so I can still easily see how hot everything is. Right now I am letting the hot CO2 build up into a XU drum but later once I'm not resource constrained that will be a tesseract. The nice thing about using SFM to control the hot CO2 plant is I can keep one and only one TRISO fuel pellet in each pebble bed fuel core, automatically swap out depleted for fresh pellets, and when the heat exchanger falls below 100mB CO2, feed another charcoal and log into the furnace which totally refills the exchanger with CO2 as well as builds a small surplus.

Back in the overworld, my boilers and turbine will be placed in the desert very close to bedrock. I have already built a proof-of-concept controller for the boiler plant using SFM and ComputerCraft to read the temperature of the boiler and feed hot CO2 into the exchanger if and only if there is at least 200mB of ammonia in the heat exchanger and if and only if the boiler is below 200C. This should eliminate even the slightest chance of an ammonia explosion. For the time being I plan to use SFM to make more ammonia on demand and allow the ammonia steam to build up in the steam lines and then run the turbine once all the ammonia has been converted to steam.

 

[ChemE]

Now that thorium reactors have been fully implemented as of version 12, has anyone been able to make one do anything? The change logs and reactorcraft in game manual so far are not enough for me to puzzle out how to get one working in creative. I assume that we must place a fuel dump valve beneath a thorium fuel core since this is how they work irl. And I further assume we need to bombard the Th core with neutrons from uranium or plutonium fission (breeder neutrons do not work). Finally, I know I need to get some molten fuel salt into the Th core but none of the reactorcraft fluids appear to do anything when charged into a Th fuel core. Anyone any further along than I am?

 

[RavynousHunter]

I've not worked with em, yet, but I do have plans to test in creative sometime today. Might be able to puzzle something out.

 

[ChemE]

You can feed molten lithium and emerald dust into a uranium processor and it will make lithium beryllium fluoride. There is a fluid called lifbe fuel in NEI, damned if I can figure out yet how it is made. Putting that in a thorium fuel core and blasting the hell out of it with neutrons still doesn't make any hot molten fuel salt. Maybe these things need a heater to keep them at a certain temperature? I'll get there...

 

[Plasmasnake]

I've been doing a bit of playing around and actually got a thorium reactor to generate steam! However, I do not know of a safe design yet to actually use in a survival setting. The one I had overheated very quickly. This is what I have learned so far:

You start by getting molten lithium by using the Centrifugal Fluid Extractor. However, this machine only operates in very particular conditions. The machine itself must be placed on y = 10 in the overworld or y = 31 in the nether to generate molten lithium, and it may or may not be possible to extract lithium in any other dimension. I can only personally prove that y = 10 in the overworld works. In addition, there must be at last 1 block of lava (does not have to be a source block) underneath the machine and 3 source blocks of lava touching the sides of the machine. Supply power to the top face and extract the lithium through the last remaining face.

Molten lithium can go directly into the Thorium Fuel Core, but I have no idea on how to proceed with that. It can go into the Uranium Processor instead. Combine it with fluorite and emerald dust and it will yield Lithium Beryllium Fluoride. I put this liquid into the Thorium Fuel Core.

This is the part that I am struggling with. How to properly and safely go from here? What I did was put the fuel core in the middle of a breeder reactor because it needs 400C to make Hot Lithium Beryllium Fluoride, but this was not a safe thing to do. While it successfully made hot fluoride, which was then taken to a Heat Exchanger surrounded by Steam Boilers to generate steam, the breeder reactor overheated quickly.

I think I have gotten pretty far by researching the reactor in reallife and by taking a peek at Reika's code (even though I am no programmer yet). I hope that this information helps my fellow crazy ReC scientists and maybe you guys can figure out a working safe design that you can use in a survival world. Curious to see what further experimentation yields

 

[ChemE]

I've been doing a bit of playing around and actually got a thorium reactor to generate steam! However, I do not know of a safe design yet to actually use in a survival setting. The one I had overheated very quickly. This is what I have learned so far:

You start by getting molten lithium by using the Centrifugal Fluid Extractor. However, this machine only operates in very particular conditions. The machine itself must be placed on y = 10 in the overworld or y = 31 in the nether to generate molten lithium, and it may or may not be possible to extract lithium in any other dimension. I can only personally prove that y = 10 in the overworld works. In addition, there must be at last 1 block of lava (does not have to be a source block) underneath the machine and 3 source blocks of lava touching the sides of the machine. Supply power to the top face and extract the lithium through the last remaining face.

Molten lithium can go directly into the Thorium Fuel Core, but I have no idea on how to proceed with that. It can go into the Uranium Processor instead. Combine it with fluorite and emerald dust and it will yield Lithium Beryllium Fluoride. I put this liquid into the Thorium Fuel Core.

This is the part that I am struggling with. How to properly and safely go from here? What I did was put the fuel core in the middle of a breeder reactor because it needs 400C to make Hot Lithium Beryllium Fluoride, but this was not a safe thing to do. While it successfully made hot fluoride, which was then taken to a Heat Exchanger surrounded by Steam Boilers to generate steam, the breeder reactor overheated quickly.

I think I have gotten pretty far by researching the reactor in reallife and by taking a peek at Reika's code (even though I am no programmer yet). I hope that this information helps my fellow crazy ReC scientists and maybe you guys can figure out a working safe design that you can use in a survival world. Curious to see what further experimentation yields

Thanks Plasmasnake. You have gotten as far as I have. I think if you stuck the thorium fuel core in the center of a breeder reactor, then you ran it as a boiler rather than a true nuclear core since it is sucking heat from your breeder rather than fissioning its own thorium. Reika's schematic shows that we need to fill the Th fuel core with LiFBe fuel which is made in the fuel enhancer but I've not been able to make that happen yet.