Containing reactor explosions

    Yet another fit of boredom inspired test here. Note I did use TMI but that's mainly because i'm not going to make a 6 chamber nuclear reactor bomb legit just to blow it up.


    anyway, standard advice is to use 3 layers of reinforced stone to contain a blast, so I set up such, complete with water surrounding the thing as it would be in a legit setup and one small hole to shut the thing down. (so I could load fuel without it going *bang*) Anyway, it did contain the blast adequately and left a nice hollow shell. Didn't have chance to put a door in, had an oopsie with the water so it went off early


    so yeah.. built a 2 layer reinforced stone box surrounding the reactor, complete with a mini-shroud covering the redstone shutoff, this time with a reinforced stone door. (one of the reactor chambers exposed for loading.
    set that little bomb off and ran. The only real weak point was the redstone shutoff hole, the rest mostly held. There was a hole or two but no damage to the surrounding terrain.


    as an aside: how much water helps? does it help putting water around the chambers as well or just the outer corners of the reactor?

    The water might save one or two of the surrounding blocks.


    For the absolute worst case scenario of a CASUC/CARUC reactor you want 4x ReStone in every direction. There are going to be some areas which you'll want or need to expose in ways; so a perfect cube shell of stone around it won't work. You want to make sure you get all of that shielding in place AND fit it all, redstone, blast protection, within a 16x16 chunk (an actual game chunk, hit f3 and the X / Z coords must have the same non-remainder part for divide by 16; that is every X and every Z result must be the same, but the results of X and Z need not match each other).


    Edit:


    Additionally I've seen partial chunk loads on slower network connections. I'm not sure if it matters since the server needs to unpack the chunk anyway, but I also try to fit my reactors within a multiple of 16 on the Y direction.

    My containment vessel has an "airlock" with a reinforced door on the outside, then another one in the block just before the inner chamber itself. Both are cotrolled by a lever above the door.


    So there's a small tunnel, one wide by 2 high (with an extra space above the inside door). I don't need to actually go into the water to service the reactor (I can stand outside the inner door) but I can enter the chamber if need be for maintenance.


    I have yet to test the design for explosion resistance, but honestly I should never need to. It's one of MJ's designs and heat never goes above 29. Something catastrophic would have to happen to the water source ring to affect that - in fact, I could just fill the inner chamber and leave it at that, as evaporation never occurs. But for hotter models, or those which rely on outside control or cooling, you definitely want to make sure it's bomb-proof.

    I've been blowing up 3-chamber 30 U-cell reactors for an hour now, and haven't been able to get through more than one layer of re-stone or re-glass... Granted, if the second layer isn't also re-something, there are problems...


    Seems to be two layers of re-glass or -stone, or about 4 of obsidian or c-foam. Seemed like it took more the last time I was playing with this.


    Also remember that the farther your wall is from the reactor, the more spread out the explosion energy is. That's assuming that the explosion physics are the same for reactors as for vanilla TNT, etc...


    these were full 6 chambered reactors filled with uranium, 2 layers was enough to contain the blast.



    oh, as a side note: 3 layers of reinforced stone is *not* enough to contain an actual nuclear bomb block.
    Says the guy with a giant crater in his test world. again... The last one was the rocket addon, I sorta oopsed and didn't set a destination, missile came down on my head and blew up half the stuff I was testing. kinda like this time. The nuke took out half the stuff I was testing.
    oh well, they're only test worlds, time to start another one!