Breeding: Worth it?

  • Having toyed around with breeders for a bit now, I'm severely questioning their utility. For instance, the "easy breeder" which is a 6 chamber reactor that is filled with dumb Reactor Plates except for 5 empty spots (so a neutral breeder) so you can actually heat it up with lava (only 5 buckets!) has a big problem in that you can only breed 4 depleted cells per rod used, and even that can only be done if you're paying attention and swap the depleted cells out at the right time. Bigger breeders are near impossible to manage if you want to do something other than babysit your reactor. It just doesn't seem worth it.


    The big problems (for me):


    1. Heating up a reactor takes too long for anything that has any active cooling at all. A simple spreader/cooling cell flower adds 60,000 base heat capacity to the reactor (30 buckets!), which makes it impractical to heat up with buckets, added to the fact that you have a very narrow window between "breeds at a reasonable speed" and "smoking crater" makes it risky to use regular reactions to heat the reactor up.


    2. Reactor cooling components melt at 10,000 heat, even if your reactor hull is good to 16,000, making that extra hull mostly worthless (if you hit it and start melting down your cooling components, the hull will rocket up to explosion in no time flat).


    3. Because you're down at 1eff for the rod while it is breeding, you have to factor that into the equation. If you breed 2 rods using 1 when your normal reactor has a 2.2 eff rating, then you're losing 1.2 eff right off the top.


    4. Mostly, it just takes too damn long. Almost an hour and a half at maximum speed. At best you're looking at two breeding runs per rod. If you spent your time mining instead of babysitting the reactor, you would almost certainly run across more rods than you would get out of your breeding program, and not have to spend hundreds of copper/iron/etc... making the reactor in the first place. It's far too much effort for too little payoff. If the rods bred in like 15 minutes or so (at max speed), then you could hang around your house building stuff and breeding rods one day to replenish the stock, but the current system basically requires you to run the breeder 24/7 to make it pay off. Nuke plants already have a disadvantage of being fuel based compared to the more common solution of just installing a ton of solar these days, why make breeding so uneconomical to boot?


    Would it have really been so bad to have a little thermometer built into the side of the reactor window similar to the energy level on energy storage units?

  • First of all breeding is rewarding. Maths have shown it can increase total efficiency by almost 10 times. But breeding needs so much babysitting i doubt much ppl will really use it. I didnt really used breeding as i get more uranium by spending time on making miners/quarries or just going in a cave so i got chests full of uranium.


    There must be some way to automate the proces.

  • Its the same issue with the Oil, we had so much and then i becomes rare and we are struggling to find alternate energy sources. Breeding would be much more efficient, if there was less Uranium, but right now we are swimming in Uranium.

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  • Its the same issue with the Oil, we had so much and then i becomes rare and we are struggling to find alternate energy sources. Breeding would be much more efficient, if there was less Uranium, but right now we are swimming in Uranium.

    Guess what would happen then? Nobody would use nuclear power anymore. The alternates are already good but nuclear power needs some more stuff like more reactor components and things to automate breeding a bit.

  • Heck, I'm already questioning my use of Nuclear power. Nuke reactors aren't exactly cheap to make and don't put out that much power with any sane design (120E/t tops generally for a Mk I non-CASUC) and you can build an awful lot of maintenance free green generators that have no chance of spontaneous explosion for the same cost.


    It seems to me that Nuke plants in general have a lot of risk and hassle for what doesn't appear to be a lot of payoff compared to spending a similar number of resources just building wind gens and making a big windmill farm, except that the Nuke plants aren't as ugly to look at. This is especially true if you build a proper containment vessel for your reactor so any screwups on your part don't punish your neighbors).

  • Heck, I'm already questioning my use of Nuclear power. Nuke reactors aren't exactly cheap to make and don't put out that much power with any sane design (120E/t tops generally for a Mk I non-CASUC) and you can build an awful lot of maintenance free green generators that have no chance of spontaneous explosion for the same cost.


    It seems to me that Nuke plants in general have a lot of risk and hassle for what doesn't appear to be a lot of payoff compared to spending a similar number of resources just building wind gens and making a big windmill farm, except that the Nuke plants aren't as ugly to look at. This is especially true if you build a proper containment vessel for your reactor so any screwups on your part don't punish your neighbors).

    I'd recomend multiple safe reactors to scale up your production. That will also up your need for uranium.

  • Heck, I'm already questioning my use of Nuclear power. Nuke reactors aren't exactly cheap to make and don't put out that much power with any sane design (120E/t tops generally for a Mk I non-CASUC) and you can build an awful lot of maintenance free green generators that have no chance of spontaneous explosion for the same cost.


    It seems to me that Nuke plants in general have a lot of risk and hassle for what doesn't appear to be a lot of payoff compared to spending a similar number of resources just building wind gens and making a big windmill farm, except that the Nuke plants aren't as ugly to look at. This is especially true if you build a proper containment vessel for your reactor so any screwups on your part don't punish your neighbors).

    I just made a mk 2-1 full cycle 160 eu/t. eff is only 2 but it will run full cycle.


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  • Quote

    Its the same issue with the Oil, we had so much and then i becomes rare and we are struggling to find alternate energy sources. Breeding would be much more efficient, if there was less Uranium, but right now we are swimming in Uranium.

    Subtle irony with this statement, lol....


    I would say Breeding is worth it if you are running on vIC only... however, seeing as I play with Thaumcraft, It actually is better to magically duplicate the material with vis than go thru the hassle of the nuclear breeding process. But, that's not to say that I'd want the process to be easier, but rather demostrate the flaws in nuclear power (or as Michio Kaka calls it, 'the Faustian Bargain ') when it comes to maintaining such destructive power...


    Hence the OP-ness of Geothermal... lol

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    this isn't about arrogance or ego, I have a block that I put a lot of freaking work into


    Every Mod Author, in existence. And yet, you STILL say otherwise.

  • I also dont understand why noone is using sequenced reactors.


    The effective EU/T is low since its cooling half of the time, but its cheep (very cheep compared to CASCU) and the EU/uranuim cell is on the maximum.