Breeder Reactors?

  • Hey guys, I was just wondering, are breeders worth the trouble? I may be needing them for my little project that i'm going to be doing... As i'm not going to use EE except for a swrg because come on dudes... the swrg. Anyway, are breeders worth it? I dont have a lot of "professional" experience with reactors other than the fact that I like to make big huge casucs with nuclear control but... Really, If I am not going to be able transmute uranium..... I will need a breeder? Please let me know what you think. Also, if anyone has any breeders that I probably haven't seen yet, please let me know. I need the best breeder for a beginner to breeding uranium (no pun intended). Thanks! :rolleyes:

  • if you have a decent mining operation and don't totally rely on nuclear power then you probably won't need a breeder

    true balance is impossible in video games the best one can hope for is to make it really hard to guess which of 2 choices are better.
    and remember kids "NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF JOKES!"

  • Well, I would like to only use nuclear since I wont be using solar farms and geothermal wouldn't work out because my base is going to be high in the air and it would be a pain to do with the mods that I plan to use. I'm really going end game style with this project... I mean, with the amount of automatic processing I plan to be doing, I'm not really sure. I hope to have one or two mark I or II reactors and maybe a breeder. I'm not entirely sure yet on the specifics but... Yeah. So... any ideas on a good breeder that a n00b would be able to understand?

  • usually people make a green gen farm big enough to power their basic workshop in case they run out of fuel and then use nuclear to handle the heavy lifting like massfabs, teleporters, terraformers, and super overclocked machines. at you altitude a wind farm would be ideal to supplement you nuclear power. spawnx has some tutorials on how to set up a good wind farm

    true balance is impossible in video games the best one can hope for is to make it really hard to guess which of 2 choices are better.
    and remember kids "NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF JOKES!"

  • So... any ideas on a good breeder that a n00b would be able to understand?

    Check the first breeder in the list of good reactor designs thread. It comes with instructions so you don't have to really worry about anything else expect that to make sure your water source is far away not to evaporate by the heat. If you want a CASUC breeder use this . It needs 1.2 water buckets per second, so set one timer to 1 second and the other to 5 seconds and surround it with 11 water.

  • As for the on in the thread, theres 2 timers? Maybe I don't completely understand all this... I run the heating config for that ammount of time and then take out the extra uranium? As for the second, I could do that maybe... 1.2 buckets a second.. hmmm.

  • I have to agree with the earlier poster who said that if you've got a decent mining operation, you probably don't need breeders. I'm playing with only IC2 and Minecraft (no CASUCS's or Redcraft for me), and while I can breed U cells pretty efficiently, it's really just as easy to dig more Uranium out of the ground.


    Having said that, I've had more fun making the breeders than anything else, as mine are not newbie reactors - they use piston-based block update detectors and some vanilla redstone circuitry to automatically stabilise their temperature at 7000 and 8000 heat (I have two reactors of slightly differing design.). So far I've made about 50 enriched uranium cells with them.


    However I have about 100 Uranium, so I don't really need to bother....

  • As for the on in the thread, theres 2 timers? Maybe I don't completely understand all this... I run the heating config for that ammount of time and then take out the extra uranium? As for the second, I could do that maybe... 1.2 buckets a second.. hmmm.

    Make a cooling system like in the picture I attach and set one of the timers to 5 sec and the other one to 1 sec, surround it with 11 water, put blocks around the reactor so that it doesn't have air cooling and run a setup with some uranium so that it heats the reactor to the point where it starts hurting you, and when it starts doing that turn it off immidiately. Then switch to the setup I posted and activate the bucket cooling system. With the amount of isotope cells and external cooling it balances out so that after it's done it doesn't heat up or cool down, and you can breed 48 isotope cells in one cycle.
    Yes, for the design in the reactor design you do exactly like you said.

    Quote

    ...stabilise their temperature at 7000 and 8000 heat...

    You shouldn't really do that, getting it to 9k+ heat makes it breed two times quicker. It is possible not to use breeders but then nuclear power isn't really used to its full potential so that it could be used for mass-fabricating. Making a few breeders isn't really that hard either, so I would heavily recommend it as you can then use nuclear power instead of the green generators which can save you tons of resources, making a good 60+ million EU per uranium ore instead of 9. Heck, im making 11 thousand EU/t in a freaking dirt hut.

    Check out this awesome mod !

    Edited once, last by jppk1 ().

  • If you're using a CASUC, you may as well go to 9000 heat - if you can stably keep that heat level, it is more productive. For the particular approach I'm using (detecting the point at which water starts to evaporate around the reactor), it's not as practical because I'd have to push the reactor to over 18000 points, which implies putting more than 20 pieces of plating in - not such a good idea.


    The thing I like about the reactor I have is that I don't need to come back in the middle of the cycle and switch things around - I only interact with it once at fuel load time, and then I leave it to look after itself for a few hours. In Uranium terms my approach is perfectly good enough - I get 6 Uranium cells out for every 1 Uranium in - if I used 9000 heat instead I would only get 7 instead. However, throughput is low - the reactor takes around 4 hours to return its six cells (it yields 8, but burns 2 in the process) due to the cooldown issues.


    I haven't tried the perfect breeder or CASUC approaches, and maybe that would be equally easy.