There are lots of ways of designing a bad reactor, and I can't cover them all here, but there are some mistakes being made over and over again....
1. Don't just make some reactor, and say -"Here, look how good this reactor is." What did you design it to be good at? Are you aiming for the all-time power record for a Vanilla IC2 reactor? Or are you doing this for a CASUC? Perhaps instead you prefer reactors that don't work at efficiency 1, and are tolerably efficient in their use of Uranium. Perhaps it's a breeder?
To make a lousy reactor post, make sure you don't decide what it ought to be good at, or if you do, don't tell us in the title.
2. Make sure you include lots and lots and lots of heat dispersers in your reactor. Why will this make your reactor worse?
a) Heat dispersers are really, really expensive to make. So unlike cooling cells, which are really cheap. So adding lots makes the reactor cost so much more!
b) Heat dispersers just move heat around, and allow you to keep hot cells cool, and cooler cells hot. But they don't actually cool down the whole assembly. So adding more means you have less space for cooling cells, which means your reactor runs hotter, for less time, at higher expense. It's a lose - lose scenario !
Conclusion. To make your reactor worse, take out cooling cells and add more heat dispersers!
3. Use Reactor plating. It's expensive, it hardly has any cooling effect, and it acts on other components in ways that are hard to understand. So obviously it would be good to put more of this into the reactor, especially if it means you can put less of those cheap, effective cooling cells in.
4. Reactor chambers are free ! Did you know this? Everyone used to think that reactor chambers were expensive, crafted only with great amounts of copper, iron, redstone and tin. But nobody making a bad reactor should worry about this - you should make a six chamber reactor for everything as they are just more HAYO. The fact that small reactors get the same amount of free cooling from water blocks as big ones is irrelevant, and you shouldn't consider either that, or the extra expense of all those chambers as being important in any way !
5. Scatter Uranium all over the reactor. Make pretty patterns with it. Be creative ! Sensible rectangular shapes are so square and boring. Who cares if they're more efficient? Forget those boring rectangles, and you too can have an inefficient reactor with a cool design motif written in Uranium!
If you put all this into practice, you too can design a 6 chamber reactor with efficiency 1, giving 100 Eu per turn and needing 90 minutes to cool down after each run, and costing enough to build three regular reactors......
