uuMatter

Quote from Garant

How to disable craft of uranium block and ingots from uuMatter?

if you play SP, the simplest way of disabling it would be just not using it. if you have a server or a modpack or something, I have no idea. though if i get it right, you could set an obscenely high initial value making replicating uranium useless.

what does it cost in total EU?

1 enriched uranium nuclear fuel needs 31 mb.. which equals 5,166,646 EU.. and if you put neutron reflectors around a cell, you get up to 8 times the output, if i recall correctly.. if you use double or quadruple cells even more.. and you get 1,000,000 EU from the cel AT LEAST, so that times 8 gives you 8,000,000 per nuclear fuel. even if you consider replicating the reflectors, i THINK you can get more out, at least if you use double or quadruple cells. i did not test this though, so feel free to correct me.

Quote from Chocohead

A reactor will run for 400,000 ticks. 1 uranium cell with 4 reflectors will produce 25 EU/t. Therefore 10M EU in total. Which would make a profit, although you'd overall be making a loss as you'd be burning up copper, tin and coal in the process.

If you went for a uranium only design, say 100 EU/t for 6 cells you could produce 40M EU, which split between 6 rods would net a theoretical profit of 9M EU, but that's also implying you've got lucky with the scrap. That 9M EU is split over 400,000 ticks, so the actual profit is a mere 22.5EU/t, which is a little more than a geothermal generator.

So apparently yes you could just about squeeze a profit out of Uranium-UU looping, although the actual EU you'd get to use would be rather uncertain until the next set of fuel rods were made, not to mention you'd have to have a mass fab and a replicator dedicated to make uranium fuel rods, which would be burning iron up (unless you UU'd that as well, which with an iron ingot costs 1.066 mb, so another 166,666 EU + scrap + rolling machine x 2). The maths in terms of replication checks out as being right, but I can only think that's because native IC2 is quite generous with Uranium Ore so the uranium values are lower than what they could be. Just increasing them a little could tip it to only making a profit with incredibly efficient uranium designs, but still with the constraint of most of the produced power being used.

well, i think you could raise the effective eu gain by using double cells, as those effectively strain the reflectors only half as much, at least according to the wiki. though a quadruple cell would be better, that would be hard to handle.

(ok, i used mauvecloud's reactor planner, and i got a design that get 56M EU from one quad fuel rod, with the reflectors having to be replaced every cycle, plus for cells and a few plates for the quad cell. I don't know the UU values though, so I'll test if it's a net gain now, that's the code in mauve's planner: 0B080D140D140D140D0803080D140D140D140D080D140D140D140D140D140D140D000D140D140D140D140D140D0B0D140D140D140D0B)

EDIT:

creating one quadruple uranium fuel cell and the eight thick neutron reflectors required to run it at maximum efficiency requires 38 milion EU according to my calculations, and i rounded up quite a bit. you get about 56 million EU out of the cell, at 140 EU/t per reactor. EU/t can be raised by just making a bunch of them. the net gain is about 18 million EU/cycle.

You guys don't believe in MOX?

Quote from roddy

You guys don't believe in MOX?

I've got no idea how MOX works XD.I only know that it's better if it's hot, I would have to look up how to make it, and building something that can perfectly hold the temperature is probably quite hard. anyway, you can get 18M EU/cycle, which is like, 20k seconds? that would be half an hour. and you can do it indefinitely.

wasn't it some kind of reprocessed fuel?

Yah, sorry for the one-liner, allow me to elaborate. It is actually very possible to run such a setup and generate positive returns with either Uranium or MOX reactors, depending on the efficiency of the reactor.

Uranium cells can be recycled through the Thermal Centrifuge into a new cell, requiring just 3 small U235 nuggets and 2 big U238 nuggets. That can be produced in the replicator at a cost of 4.65 mB of UUmatter, which even without scrap requires just 4.65 MEU of power in the Mass Fabricator. This means that the break-even point is an efficiency of 2.325 at 2 MEU per cell for Uranium setups, which is very easy to hit. This does not take into account either scrap effects or single use cooling costs, since those are harder to quantify.

Also, Uranium cycles produce tiny amounts of plutonium which are not required to keep the process going, and will eventually allow you to use MOX to do this. The numbers for MOX are 13.78 mB of UUmatter per recycled cell, and 13.78 efficiency at 1MEU per cell, also very easy to hit with MOX. Anyway, all this is not related to the original question, just sharing some ideas around...

Quote from blub01

I've got no idea how MOX works XD.I only know that it's better if it's hot, I would have to look up how to make it, and building something that can perfectly hold the temperature is probably quite hard. anyway, you can get 18M EU/cycle, which is like, 20k seconds? that would be half an hour. and you can do it indefinitely.

I use this with dual MOX cells for 700 EU/t, total 140 MEU per 10000s cycle. 8 cells takes 110 mB of UUmatter, meaning a net gain of 30 MEU or 30 UUmatter depending on your preference. Do bear in mind if you want to use it with regular Uranium cells, it is a Mk II-E and will blow up just before 20000s. To avoid this, either give it some mid-cycle cooldown time or uprate one more of the heat vents to advanced.

my java won't let me look at this, apparently it's unsafe.