Reactor: What Went Wrong?!

1st Official Post

    I've been running my first reactor(+2 chamber) for a couple days now without incident. Last night I decided to try refining some old uranium cells I'd been holding on to just to see how it works. I used the online designer and came up with a design that worked. I put everything in and it seemed to be working. I let it run overnight. When I came to look at it in the morning, it was shut down, the old cells were recharged, the new(now used) cells had turned in to partially depleted cells(both of them! Wow!), and everything seemed fine. EXCEPT. The water surrounding my generator was almost all gone, and a wooden sign that was near it was also gone. Did my generator nearly meltdown? Have I miscalculated heat and nearly had the worst accident? That's the only thing I can think of... Thoughts?


    Nuke...

    • Official Post

    The first signs of a nuclear reactor getting close to critical is water evaporating (which of course then causes the reactor to heat up even faster). It also causes fire around it, and generates some lava.


    Then it disappears, leaving behind a big hole filled with lots of tears. :)


    I'd wager that yes, you got close to overheating. Did any of your coolant items inside get destroyed/changed?

    No... everything inside the generator was as I left it. I purposely engineered the setup to have the reactor just behind the uranium cells in heat. In my test models, the reactor ended up at something like 9500 heat at the end of the cycle when both uranium cells finally wore out.

    • Official Post
    Quote from Nuke

    No... everything inside the generator was as I left it. I purposely engineered the setup to have the reactor just behind the uranium cells in heat. In my test models, the reactor ended up at something like 9500 heat at the end of the cycle when both uranium cells finally wore out.


    Thats it then -- it explodes at 10,000 but will cause the other effects at lower temps. 9500 is definitely enough to evaporate water.


    If you put your source blocks a few blocks above your reactor, so that they basically 'rain' onto it -- the reactor will evaporate the 'moving' water blocks, but the source water blocks will remain intact.

    Ah...well then. My design can actually run a little cooler and still complete refining both cells in one go, so I'll try that. =D Thanks for the info, and I'm glad my reactor didn't explode since it's 4 blocks away from my home. =D (Yeah, that probably wasn't a great decision...)

    Quote from Direwolf20

    Thats it then -- it explodes at 10,000 but will cause the other effects at lower temps. 9500 is definitely enough to evaporate water.


    If you put your source blocks a few blocks above your reactor, so that they basically 'rain' onto it -- the reactor will evaporate the 'moving' water blocks, but the source water blocks will remain intact.

    Actually the boiling-, melting- and exploding-points are variable, depending on number of chambers and reactor plating. So with a few chambers you can sefely pass 10k heat :)

    Since the water was basically gone, I took the opportunity to expand the area of the reactor to handle a couple more chambers, which should keep things safer for me. I think.