Effective breeders in Experimental

  • Having just finished assembling my first nuclear reactor with out it going KABOOM on me, i now need a breeder reactor to replenish my fuel rods, however i have come upon a bit of a snag, the only breeder layouts on the official thread i can find that dont require excessive amounts of resources to make, use stacks of ' heating cells' however having checked both NEI and the creative mode menu i cant find them anywhere, and the crafting recipes dont work (IC Experimental - 2.0.299)


    have i missed something? and if they are no longer in IC2, can someone point me to a decent breeder layout that can be implemented easily without heating cells?

  • Breeders don't exist anymore.


    Instead MOX mechanics have been implemented.


    Basically, EVERY fuel rod results in a depleted fuel rod. These depleted fuel rods are run through the thermal centrifuge for some iron dust and a small amount of plutonium. Once you have enough plutonium, you mix it with uranium and get MOX cells which last half as long as Uranium and have boosted efficiency based on reactor temp.


    A bit of searching around the forums can get you more detailed information on MOX reactor mechanics.

  • AAAAAAAAHHH so thats what MOX is... had seen some MOX entities in NEI i had no clue what they did.
    so hang on, if the efficiency changes, do i need a different reactor layout to accommodate them without if blowing up?
    sorry my understanding of nuclear engineering is very limited
    thanks

  • MOX works exactly like uranium. The behavior in the reactor is the same in every aspect.


    The only thing that changes is the EU/t output as an additional step after the primary calculation, based on the percentage of hull heat the reactor has. The fuel rods inside don't change. They still perform as they always did. They do not suddenly change efficiency or output more heat than before or anything like that - they simply gain an additional bonus that's independent from anything else. Any design that is safe with uranium is also safe with MOX. However, if you want to maintain a high hull heat level, you will run into troubles with components that exchange heat with the hull (and the fact that almost all common uranium designs force the fuel rods themselves to exchange heat with the hull).


    What you'll want to do is read Alblaka's reactor overview (and I mean read, don't skim or TL;DR) so you understand how components and fuel rods behave in certain situations. Best grab the reactor planner and try to see it in action. Then when you're firm on that, read about MOX reactors. Useful designs start cropping up after the bugfixes on page 2, but the earlier posts also discuss some theory that you might want to check out.