This is support to service as a short guide and reference thread for the wonderfull topic of nuclear power in industrialcraft 2. (Designs in post 2)
Some other important concepts that are important to understand is how you measure the efficiency of a reactor. Here it is designed as the average amount of eu you get from each fuel rod during a complete cycle
divided by one million [Meu/fuel rod].So This means a efficiency 5 reactor design with a total of 12 fuel rods will produce 12*5=60 million eu before you need to change fuel. Depending on fuel type this will be either
10000s(mox), 20000s (enriched fuel) and 50000s (gregtech thorium).
How to get into the design list:
1. it needs to be either better or cheaper than current design (motivate why it is better)
2. Only the best and commonly used designs are presented, ie 0-6 chamber reactors compete on the same playing field
3. Should follow the template used in the design list
4. State which mods are used to make it work
5. Should be easy to automate, this means it's should not mix fuel rods. (they can still be added as a bonus design thought)
6. The reactor should preferably be tested in game to make sure it's safe
7. Bonus designs are reactors that fit a specific niche or mixed fuel rod designs that perform better than the non mixed designs.
Nuclear power comes in many shapes and sizes and there are several different types of reactors each with it's perks and downsides. First is the reactor itself which is a modular multiblock
structure which modifies how much space you have to play with when building the reactor core.Depending on if you have only the nuclear reactor or an additional 0-6 reactor chambers it will cost:
iron 33-81, Lead 48-72, copper 2,Tin 2 1/3, lapis 2, redstone 8, glowstone 2, rubber 7
The basic reactor:
The regular reactor produces power directly and does not need further machinery to produce power. The easiest ones are the Mark 1 reactors. These are low risk reactors which does not require
extra controles to avoid a crater where your base once was.These are the baseline for comparison with the other reactor types. Depending on the core design these are based around balancing
efficiency vs power output. High efficiency means you get more out of your nuclear fuel but the power output will be lower than a lower efficiency reactor of the same size. Basically the
higher the efficiency the larger the ratio between heat produced and power produced.
Mark 2-5 reactors:
These reactors produce more heat than they can handle and will explode if left on. This is solved by turning the reactor on and off to give it time to cool down.On average they will produce about the same power as
the basic reactor but at a much higher efficiency. There are two ways of Controlling these types of reactors. The first way this is done is through the nuclear controle mod.This allows you to automatically turn the
reactor on and off based on the reactor temperature.This also happens to be the only way to run mox in 5x5 reactors.
Example:
http://i.imgur.com/0FwtHwM.jpg
The second way is to turn the reactor on and off at controled cycles (example: 5 seconds on, 4 seconds off) which can be done with a redstone clock and redstone repeaters. The redstone clock should be set
to emit a redstone pulse once every complete mini cycle (9 seconds). You then extend this redstone pulse to the desired time you want the reactor on (5seconds).
Redstone controle example:
http://prntscr.com/7bxxzf
Fluid reactors (or 5x5X5)
The fluid generator is more complicated, more expensive but is a lot more efficient and will in most cases produce the most power of all nuclear reactors (Mox can sometimes produce more). Instead of producing power directly you pump coolant fluid into the reactor which in turn turns into hot coolant in the reactor. The hot coolant can then be sent to heat exchanger that heat either stirling generators or steam generators.Stirling generators produce power directly at a 50% ratio while the the steam generator produces superheated steam (with distilled water) which can then be sent to two steam turbines to produce power. A condensator is used to turn the remaining steam into distilled water again and it is sent back. This produces power at a 75% ratio.
Tutorial for superheated steam setups
http://youtu.be/_Zn7UGDkQn0
The amount of hot coolant that is produces from the reactor is twice the amount of heat that the reactor produces. Since the ratio between power and heat increases at higher efficiencies this means that the efficiency of 5x5x5 actually scales more than linearly (a 7 efficiency regular reactor would actually have efficiency of 42 with superheated steam). And since the power output is based on the cooling the high efficiency designs are just plain better than low efficiency designs. So a good fluid generator design is basically a regular design but with as high efficiency as possible.
It should also be noted that thorium designs and reflector designs are extremly well suited for fluid reactors as they don't loose power output and gain even more from the increased efficiency than regular reactors.
Mox reactors.
Mox fuel increases its output as the temperature of the reactor increases. For regular reactors this means that at higher temperatures it will produce more power. The higest safe temperature a reactor an be without melting the enviroment is 85% which increases it's output by (0,85*4+1)= 4,4 at the most. This enables extremly compact reactors than can produce large amounts of power while being relatively inexpensive. The mox designs are built so they pull no heat from the core but only from the fuel rods. This means that the reactor won't cool down over time. By removing one or several of the heat vents closest to the fuel rods the reactor can then safely be heated up into the desired temperature at which point you put them back again. The reactor will then keep this temperature and produce power at a much higher rate.
Fluid mox generators behave differently than the regular generators as it doubles it's het output when it goes over 50% heat. This means a reactor that produces 600 heat at 0-50% heat will producel 1200 heat at 51-100%. Because of this fluid mox designs must use the nuclear controle mod and use a design that only pulls heat from the core. Theoretically It could also be made by using advanced heat vents able to handle the output above 50% heat as a regular mox design however this would be quite low in output.
The new reactor simulator can be found here
https://github.com/MauveCloud/Ic2ExpReactorPlanner/releases
By: MauveCloud
