Well, the best I managed so far is this: http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…06u1rbey64bmw0jsnfr6ccvsw
Especially vexing about this is the fact that the lower left corner melts off while the upper right corner is running below capacity (reduce the time slider to see what I mean).
Okay, as a result of tonight's research, I abandoned my previous idea, and looked for some alternatives with less than 4 neighbours for the plutonium (I still might make a 6-chamber with that config someday):
[GregTech 3.04+] 3-chamber plutonium/thorium hybrid
+5 thorium positive, 144 EU/t, plutonium efficiency 6.5 / 9, thorium efficiency 2.8 / 7.
Intended Cell Layout: http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…njccle9jt9l7lndir1n4zyqyo (429.6 heat output)
Cooling System Mockup: http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…ggc6lktkiuy5jfdl9tcivw9og (432 cooling capacity)
Interesting quirk: in the GregTech computercube, this is fully stable. In the reactor planner, the normal heat exchanger at the bottom right needs to be replaced by a component (gold) heat exchanger. Probably due to the minimal heat output profile differences between the intended cell layout and the "stunt double".
Cost Without Cells: 478 copper, 70 tin, 250 iron, 26 gold, 3 diamonds.
Advantage: can be tightly packed with others of its kind. Fairly high efficiency and not too expensive.
Disadvantage: Still needs a thorium sink somewhere to balance it out. Also, each 3-chamber system needs an advanced regulator of its own if full automation is intended, which can get expensive very quickly. The alternative is of course to use pure plutonium, partnered with reflectors instead of thorium cells. Which also gets expensive very quickly :p
[GregTech 3.04+] 4 chamber plutonium/thorium hybrid
+18 thorium positive, 206 EU/t, plutonium efficiency 5 / 9, thorium efficiency 3 / 7
Intended Cell Layout: http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…on2insg1anlogcq75v3d15rls (505.6 heat output)
Cooling System Mockup: http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…1t1mj6o4a4ego9tw63ryq6800 (506 cooling capacity)
Cost Without Cells: 602 copper, 82 tin, 296 iron, 30 gold, 6 diamonds.
Advantage: more EU/t than the other design, can be tightly packed with others of its kind, would need less reflectors or advanced regulators per EU/t which drives costs down
Disadvantage: less efficient, very strongly unbalanced, slightly bigger, whether the saved regulators or reflectors make up for the more expensive reactors is unknown
Disadvantage: Still needs a thorium sink somewhere to balance it out. Also, each 3-chamber system needs an advanced regulator of its own if full automation is intended, which can get expensive very quickly. The alternative is of course to use pure plutonium, partnered with reflectors instead of thorium cells. Which also gets expensive very quickly :p
If the reactors are placed adjacent to eachother, you should only need 4 routers to manage the refueling of as many as you want. You can also connect non-adjacent reactors with neutral blocks like furnaces to extend the reach of routers.
I have a setup on 1.4.7 with 8 routers fully automating two perfect hybreeders and 8 4-chamber thorium-neutral reactors (along with AE import busses to grab depleted and re-enriched uranium cells). With AE feeding the routers, you can craft components on-demand.
True, good point. Though I normally don't run Factorization in my worlds because there's little reason to... I suppose this case begs a re-evaluation of that.
I need to learn more about how cooling systems work.
My primary question right now is: http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…uo7ew8zev4w4oe6r36ve8hudc
How come these four overclocked vents at the bottom aren't drawing any heat? It's an issue I've been running into constantly the last couple of days, when it never troubled me before (and I don't think the planner was updated, or was it?)
cause when the calculation of the Reactor reaches them, there is 0 heat in the reactor left to draw
@ skavier: Aaaah, I see now. That actually makes a lot of sense. And... hrm, that'll be annoying to work around.
In the meantime, to complement post 282:
[GregTech 3.04+] 6 chamber, high efficiency, medium output thorium sink reactor
-40 thorium negative, 216 EU/t, thorium efficiency 5.4 / 7
Intended Cell Layout: http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…rljkvsxyu0ua6sgdcot06g16o (566.4 heat output)
Cooling System Mockup: http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…mcas5t5b0fylq0cz33kpu0em8 (568 cooling capacity)
Cost Without Cells: 652 copper, 100 tin, 350 iron, 32 gold, 5 diamonds.
Advantage: Efficiency and output are good for a pure thorium reactor. Only a single cell type means it can be fully automated by the simplest of methods.
Disadvantage: Unsuitable for solo operation, but rather meant to go with pure plutonium reactors or thorium positive hybrids as a fuel consumption balancer. Running cost of 50 copper per (7-hour) cycle.
[GregTech 3.04+] 0-chamber, cheap thorium sink reactor
-12 thorium negative, 52 EU/t, thorium efficiency 4.33 / 7
Intended Cell Layout: http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…bcdq4g1e5iqgaexmvbbp63w8w (112 heat output)
Cooling System Mockup: http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…ickaqql54gf59a833zzi4cnwg (118 cooling capacity)
Cost Without Cells: 224 copper, 16 tin, 84 iron, 18 gold.
Advantage: Decent efficiency, cheap to build, negligible running costs (less than 1 copper per hour). Only a single cell type means it can be fully automated by the simplest of methods.
Disadvantage: Unsuitable for solo operation, but rather meant to go with pure plutonium reactors or thorium positive hybrids as a fuel consumption balancer.
EDIT - This design is not stable ingame because the planner simulates the heat distribution wrong. See post #296.
Okay, one last and then I'll stop, I promise 
Feel free to critique/improve by the way, I still consider myself an amateur.
[GregTech 3.04+] 6 chamber, maximum efficiency, neutral plutonium / thorium hybrid
+/- 0 thorium neutral, 194 EU/t, plutonium efficiency 8 / 9, thorium efficiency 3.4 / 7
Intended Cell Layout: http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…1nxk7ef4uwh9u99b8vfbsj6kg (668.8 heat output)
Cooling System Mockup: http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…9adr94pxpenrc7jgjhucgr280 (672 cooling capacity)
Cost Without Cells: 700 copper, 104 tin, 387 iron, 38 gold, 6 diamonds.
Advantage: Amazing efficiency without a single reflector. This thing pulls 388 million EU out of 50 re-enriched isotopes! The highest efficiency uranium reactor on the front page, at 4.67 efficiency, would give you just 233.5 million for the same isotopes. This hybrid is also thorium neutral, meaning you can run it by itself off the output ratio of a centrifuge without accruing an excess of either fuel type.
Disadvantage: Slow EU/t compared to uranium, especially considering the price of the reactor. But that's just how plutonium rolls - it rules efficiency, while uranium remains the output king.
But that's just how plutonium rolls - it rules efficiency, while uranium remains the output king.
Not if its CRCS
Seriously though, I wonder how viable that would actually be - use all of your plutonium in a crazy eu/t/efficiency CRCS reactor, while using the thorium in a breeder and a bunch of smaller reactors. I imagine (without doing any sums) it would probably be more efficient to just go with the bog-standard hybrids. Still, would be fun to try.
CRCS breaks the rules, you can't count that 
I mean, even then you'll get more EU/t per heat from uranium, but you just don't care about the ratio because you can just build extra cooling towers.
Honestly, if it wasn't for a bug that will significantly impact CRCS, I'd try to cobble together a 1.5.1 build to experiment with an idea I had. Unfortunately, there's this cute little problem in Jenkens listed:
Don't register 30k/60k coolant cells, exploit worthy
Until that gets resolved, any experimentation with CRCS is rendered null and void.
Unless you use gregtech coolant cells.
Unless you use gregtech coolant cells.
That assumes one uses GregTech to begin with. I prefer to make designs which don't require GregTech, but which can take advantage of the additional options fairly easily.
Alright, I think I've found a satisfactory method to describe the efficiency of hybrid reactors, although I have yet to come up with a good name for it. See how in post #288 I talked about how much EU the reactor pulls out of a given number of isotopes? We'll just use that, and compare it to what we'd get if all the isotopes were used for uranium instead. It is convenient because uranium outputs 1 million EU per efficiency per cell, which gives extremely simple math with small numbers.
Let's take the plutonium / thorium hybrid out of post #288. It's a thorium neutral design, which makes things easy.
First, we'll figure out how much energy it produces per cycle. The cycle is 25,000 seconds long, so 25,000 (seconds) * 20 (ticks per second) * 194 (EU per tick) = 97,000,000
Second, we need to figure out how many isotopes we're using. Looking into the reactor, we see that we have two plutonium cells and 10 thorium cells. Gotta be careful here: 12 is not the correct number. A centrifuge will produce plutonium and thorium in a 1:4 ratio, and this reactor is neutral. So looking at the 2 plutonium, we should see 8 thorium cells. Why are there 10 in the reactor? Because thorium runs longer, meaning that the dual plutonium cell gets replaced partway through the cycle. That's where the "extra" 0.5 plutonium is hiding that we need to get the 1:4 ratio the centrifuge gives us. 2.5 : 10 equals 1:4. Thus the amount of isotopes consumed per cycle is 12.5. Of course, there are no half isotopes ingame, but for the purposes of math this is irrelevant.
Third, we're going to pretend that we took 12.5 isotopes - the same number we determined in step 2 - and turned them into uranium cells. And we're going to ask the question: how efficient would this uranium have to be, hypothetically, to produce 97 million EU (calculated in step 1)? Because 1 uranium cell is worth 1 million EU per efficiency, we can just directly divide the two figures: 97 / 12.5 = 7.76. And the number we get automatically equals efficiency.
This approach is a modified cell value efficiency calculation, only that it's based on isotopes and not the fuel cells themselves. This neatly avoids the problem of each fuel type having different base values and (in the case of plutonium) different scaling factors, and instead allows all reactors to be described by one reference fuel (uranium in this case, because the math is the easiest, and because standard IC2 reactors are the foundation of it all). But how to call it? Isotope value efficiency / IV efficiency? I'm not sold yet.
Now obviously, this begs the question how to handle designs that are not neutral. If you look at the 4-chamber design in post #282, that's a grossly unbalanced one. +18 thorium positive - that means it's almost entirely plutonium. Specifically, we're looking at 5 plutonium and 20 thorium cells per cycle, the latter of which only 2 are actually used. It would seem that there are only 7 isotopes at work here, and if we divided the 103 million energy output by 7, that would result in an efficiency of over 14.71!
But I think that's the wrong approach. After all, in order to get these 5 plutonium cells, you had to process 25 isotopes, even if 18 of them are never seeing the inside of the reactor and are now lying in your storage unused as thorium. Thus to be fair, you'll need to divide the 103 million EU by 25 instead, for an efficiency of 4.12. Harsh! Even pure uranium posts better numbers than that, yet this reactor is almost pure plutonium!
Doesn't that undervalue the reactor though? After all you still have 18 thorium cells that you could potentially get energy out of. How can we represent their value? Basically: we can't express it in the efficiency of the unbalanced hybrid. The only thing you can do is write the efficiency and the thorium unbalance down together: 'efficiency 4.12 +18T'. That way everyone knows that there are unused fuel cells. The same goes for thorium negative designs; those too will have to post a lower than expected efficiency figure, since they cause unused plutonium cells to pile up in your storage. I'm of half a mind here to drop the 'thorium negative' moniker altogether in favor of a system that only expresses positive values. Like something that is '-2 thorium negative' could also be written as '+0.5 plutonium positive' or 'efficiency x.xx +0.5P', because the 1:4 ratio describes that for every 2 thorium cells there will be half a plutonium cell. An added advantage is that this also works for uranium / thorium hybrids and uranium / plutonium hybrids.
What you can do, however, is rate entire reactor systems together, provided the system as a whole is neutral, or can be made quasi-neutral by controlling which reactors cycle how often.
For example, we have the efficiency 4.12 +18T hybrid discussed above. We could pair it with something that consumes all that thorium. Like, the cheap 0-chamber thorium sink reactor in post #287. Let's profile it quickly: 12 isotopes per cycle, all thorium. It outputs 26 million EU per cycle. To produce 12 thorium, we have to process 15 isotopes and generate 3 plutonium on the side, so the reactor's efficiency is 1.73 +3P. Abysmal!
But the thing is, you already have the thorium from the other hybrid. You don't need to centrifuge any isotopes at all. Run the 4-chamber hybrid for 2 cycles, and you have 36 unused thorium. This can also run the thorium reactor for 3 cycles, with no extra isotopes required - the system of two reactors is quasi-neutral. So 50 isotopes for two cycles of 103 million EU and three cycles of 26 million EU: 103 + 103 + 26 + 26 + 26 = 284. Dividing that by our 50 isotopes yields an efficiency score of 5.68. Much better than the 4.12 and 1.73 these two had on their own.
So anyway, that was a whole lot of text and math and numbers. Consider it a post worth of being my 100th on this forum 
If anyone actually bothered to read it, tell me what you think!
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Efficiency per uranium ingot is how I often make my final analysis of a system of reactors. Which is just your per isotope efficiency * 8. I like to think of it this way to account for how much energy my fuel supply can create.
IC2 average around 26m EU per ingot. Ignoring running costs or with say GT reflectors, you should hit maybe 50m.
Old gregtech was 90-140m per ingot.
I havn't looked at the new gregtech reactor stuff for a couple weeks.
Sounds like the new gregtech is maybe top end uranium numbers without the high running costs. Something in the 50 million per ingot range, but with some fuel usage scenarios not actually being much better than uranium.
Ignoring cost to build for a moment would you get more out of each ingot running plutonium+thorium or eff 7 iridium reflector quad uranium?
To be relevant plutonium+thorium should beat that usage scenario, but i don't think it does, which is why i left it off my personal 1.5.1 pack.
Sounds like the new gregtech is maybe top end uranium numbers without the high running costs. Something in the 50 million per ingot range, but with some fuel usage scenarios not actually being much better than uranium.
Ignoring cost to build for a moment would you get more out of each ingot running plutonium+thorium or eff 7 iridium reflector quad uranium?
To be relevant plutonium+thorium should beat that usage scenario, but i don't think it does, which is why i left it off my personal 1.5.1 pack.
That's pretty much what my math is trying to answer, yes - the efficiency number it computes is directly comparable with uranium. So the hybrid reactor in post #288 with its efficiency of 7.76 does beat the 7.00 of quad uranium surrounded by reflectors.
Except for the fact that that reactor doesn't work, as I just discovered in my test world today. The cooling system relies on the fact that the overclocked vent in the lower right corner cannot pull enough heat from the reactor to melt itself down, because no more heat is left to be pulled. Unfortunately the actual game doesn't work that way. You still get one vent that isn't under full load, but it's not the one in the lower right corner. Instead it's one randomly somewhere in the middle or top. I don't begin to understand how and why the reactor planner is simulating things wrong, but the net result is that the design as posted is not stable. If anyone wants to try their hand at making it stable, please share your results.
However, you definitely do beat uranium surrounded by reflectors if you simply use pure plutonium or thorium and surround that with reflectors. Quad plutonium is completely uncoolable with internal vents in all scenarios where it has more than two neighbours (and only very few work with two), but you can get dual plutonium in a 4-neighbour situation just fine. If you look into my spreadsheet, you can see some theoretical comparisons between uranium and plutonium/thorium centrifuge output in different neighbour configurations. Overall you can get more output if you centrifuge your isotopes and run them in the same reflector configurations as you would if you used uranium.
Case in point, let's do some math: one dual plutonium cell with 4 reflectors, and two quad thorium cells with 4 reflectors each (you said to ignore build cost, after all :P). You'll get 64 million + 14 million + 14 million EU, equals 92 million. For the same 10 isotopes, you could have two and a half quad uranium cells surrounded by reflectors, which would pull 28 + 28 + 14 = 70 million. So a 22 million EU advantage in a scenario that could conceivably happen in practical application. Plutonium doesn't do as good as expected here because you cannot use quad cells for heat reasons and thus it isn't running at maximum efficiency. Still, efficiency 9.2 isn't half bad.
Also you can reach reflector-like efficiencies without paying the huge cost associated with reflectors. The multi-reactor system I am planning for my next world will do efficiency 6.84 without using a single reflector. Granted, all those reactors aren't exactly cheap either, but they won't cost me emeralds and they do output a total of 1,368 EU/t all together And there is no CRCS involved, just internal vents. I bet if you tried to beat that kind of EU/t and efficiency with just uranium and reflectors, you'd be paying a lot more than I will be.
EDIT: And that's going to be a system built to look cool. If you aim for maximum efficiency you can go higher with a multi-reactor system, even without reflectors.
Not sure where to post this, so if it's in the wrong place, please accept my apology. This is a variation on another reactor I stumbled on, and in my version, the breeder is capable of refreshing isotopes at a rate that allows for effectively infinite refueling (for as long as you can get hands on coal to make the dust).
Mark I Breeder EB (Hybrid) :
made it cheaper. like always.
viable design will reenrich its need in uranium, this is always convienient.
reduced copper and gold costs greatly, a bit higher iron cost.
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…xdq3gze9hfl1sd70o238e3chs
Given that 3M EU = 3 UU = 20 coal, even the coal dust isn't out of reach. Here's my only gripe: I wish I could automate this to the point that it will use automatic crafting tables to handle the coal dust recipes, and then put things back in the right places. Something with timers and/or retrievulators, I think.
Alternative take on that hybrid... http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…rrqymz29zvyrfs859owahi4g0
much more expensive, due to 11 heating cells... but now breeds heavily.
Here's another hybrid http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…rnx5xeveqz27jeab9ygqirf9c
