[Official] New Reactors design thread.

    Quote from Shakie666

    I was thinking: what if you made a hybrid system, running the plutonium in a CRCS setup (for better efficiency), while using some of your thorium as cheap neutron reflectors? Something like this. It has the advantage of avoiding the extortionate costs of iridium neutron reflectors, and it shouldn't overheat, but i'm not 100%. I can't try it on the computer cube since i'm not on 1.5.2 yet, could someone who is test it?


    I had a similar idea, but I don't know if regular vents can keep up with the thorium + 2 reflectors in the latest update. If it can... awesome. Otherwise, upgrade to OC vents.


    Right now, I'm running with my Private Public mod pack, which doesn't have IC2 in it, much less GregTech. Between the updates and the bugfixing and config file tweaking (particularly on the forestry backpacks to store all the type-appropriate mod items), I haven't had much of a chance to do any testing in my IC2 testworld.


    Having looked over the GregTech recipes for solars and other options, I find it amusing that nuclear is now the cheap option. That should be a meme... Gregtech: Where Nuclear Power is the cheap option.

    Quote from Kenken244

    Not really. The changed recipes are usually actually cheaper, just higher tier.


    Depends on the config options. Sure, some of them got less expensive if you have the proper infrastructure (which has a tendency to explode if a butterfly flaps its wings on a different continent), some of 'em got a lot more expensive.

    as far as generators go, the only one that is more expensive is the watermill, and that was a little cheap considering that it generated the most eu out of all the greengens when properly automated. Though it does help make some of the cheaper reactor designs a viable early-mid game power source.

    Quote from Shakie666

    I was thinking: what if you made a hybrid system, running the plutonium in a CRCS setup (for better efficiency), while using some of your thorium as cheap neutron reflectors? Something like this. It has the advantage of avoiding the extortionate costs of iridium neutron reflectors, and it shouldn't overheat, but i'm not 100%. I can't try it on the computer cube since i'm not on 1.5.2 yet, could someone who is test it?

    You get a little over five and a half minutes (342.95 seconds) at 2412 EU/t before the coolant cells pop in the Computer Cube (running 3.06d Gregtech over 1.115.336-lf IC2), which is... pretty nice. By comparison, Thick Neutron Reflectors return 2400EU/t for 343 seconds. Thorium definitely makes more sense, both from a cost and performance perspective. Not sure if the heat vents make much sense on the corners, or if there's anything that can go in those slots meaningfully -- I'm seeing less than a seconds of difference between heat vents and empty space.

    A) You don't have the lapis lazuli.
    B) You don't have the redstone.
    C) You can't sanely store enough redstone (400 stacks?!) for a full cycle even if you did find it.
    D) Automation costs are nontrivial, and any serious latency turns your house into glowing crater.
    E) Even if you did, those aren't terribly good uses of the materials. Removing those reflectors and squishing the entire array down into four rows on the first reactor, for example, leaves you with the exact same performance profile as you started with and saves a lot of resources.

    Quote from gattsuru

    You get a little over five and a half minutes (342.95 seconds) at 2412 EU/t before the coolant cells pop in the Computer Cube (running 3.06d Gregtech over 1.115.336-lf IC2), which is... pretty nice. By comparison, Thick Neutron Reflectors return 2400EU/t for 343 seconds. Thorium definitely makes more sense, both from a cost and performance perspective. Not sure if the heat vents make much sense on the corners, or if there's anything that can go in those slots meaningfully -- I'm seeing less than a seconds of difference between heat vents and empty space.

    The heat vents in the corners are there to disperse heat created by the thorium cells. Cooling cells can only absorb heat from any fissionable material thats directly next to them, meaning the heat from the thorium would otherwise have nowhere to go other than into the reactor hull, with explosive results.


    The thorium isn't really there for extra power, its just acting as cheap neutron reflectors.

    Quote from Shakie666

    The heat vents in the corners are there to disperse heat created by the thorium cells. Cooling cells can only absorb heat from any fissionable material thats directly next to them, meaning the heat from the thorium would otherwise have nowhere to go other than into the reactor hull, with explosive results.


    Ah, that'd be it, and an obvious reason. I guess I expected a more significant increase in rate of hull heat rise, since just four two-neighbor'd thorium worth of heat like that'd blow the reactor up in a couple minutes even outside of the plutonium. But the quad plutonium's on an entirely different scale of instant burn once the coolant cells run out.

    Quote

    The thorium isn't really there for extra power, its just acting as cheap neutron reflectors.


    Yeah. I'd much rather spend a tin and a thorium dust over 8 copper and 4 tin of a neutron reflector, at least in a CRCS situation. Have to balance the extra heat issue outside of one.

    Anyone managed to get a CRCS reactor set up with AE fuzzy buses? Testing in the FTB 1.5.2 beta, it seems to not be able to differentiate between damaged and non-damaged 360k coolant cells, and certainly doesn't let you set a damage range to use. Precision import buses suffer from the opposite problem of being too picky about exact damage values, meaning that chances are your coolant cells will not be extracted before they melt down.

    You can set up to eight versions of the same item on a Precision Export Bus, which can cover a somewhat wider range of damaged cell. Still not a terribly wide one, and this complicates the use of pretty much any AE device to deactivate your reactor when there's too many hot coolant cells around. I tried an almost-pure-Applied Energitics reactor circuit and it worked for three microcycles before going boom.


    It's probably safer to just use ComputerCraft as a timer. Use fuzzy busses set to only act on redstone activation, then use one side of the computer to shut down the power plant, pull out every coolant cell whether it needs it or not, add the fresh coolant cells, and then turn the power plant back on. You can even use ME Level Emitters to check that you had enough fresh coolant cells before trying to load them in, then check that they were removed from the AE network before turning the computer back on. Note that all Level Emitters are Precision, as of AE-rv10.n, though, so they're not very good for telling how many hot coolant packs you have.

    Quote from hausfath

    Anyone managed to get a CRCS reactor set up with AE fuzzy buses? Testing in the FTB 1.5.2 beta, it seems to not be able to differentiate between damaged and non-damaged 360k coolant cells, and certainly doesn't let you set a damage range to use. Precision import buses suffer from the opposite problem of being too picky about exact damage values, meaning that chances are your coolant cells will not be extracted before they melt down.


    Isn't the whole point of a fuzzy bus that it can tell if its damaged or not? Is this a bug thats being fixed? Or is it supposed to be this way?


    If it is supposed to be this way, then that would knock the skids out from under any future CRCS systems. I guess i'll have to stick to 1.4.7 for as long as possible.

    Quote from Shakie666

    Isn't the whole point of a fuzzy bus that it can tell if its damaged or not? Is this a bug thats being fixed? Or is it supposed to be this way?


    According to the AE site, fuzzy buses should differentiate between damaged and undamaged types of the same item, so that seems to be a bug. It's one that also (in rv10.n) occurred with most coolant packs (as well as all chargable tools, which have an NBT value even when fully charged), but not with a Thorium Cell or Flint and Steel. Put it in their bug tracker, will see what the response is. Even if they worked properly for coolant packs, though, fuzzy buses can't tell the difference between a Flint and Steel:1 (nearly but not quite perfect condition) and a Flint and Steel:54 (only a couple uses from breaking). Add in the relatively slow action rate for these buses -- they only pull or place one item every five ticks -- and you're still going to want some outside timer triggering them.


    And probably turning off your power plant.

    Fuzzy Export Buses can also be redstone activated. Therefore, you can have a fuzzy export bus with cooling cell of choice set to only activate on restone signal, then have an MFR rednet cable connected to it's version of a timer. Then Precise Import Buses to only import full cells.


    And for the cooling towers, you hook up a storage bus. It will then 'see' the cooling cells in the towers, and the precise import buses on your power reactor will only pull the full ones.

    Anyone have a good suggestion for a relatively cheap thorium-based breeder (to start off my nuclear production) that works with Gregtech's new thorium behavior? I'm on a world where the old 8x depleted isotopes per uranium is still enabled to help keep nuclear viable vs MFR tree farms and spammed boilers.

    High Power No Running Cost.


    EU/t: 280
    Efficiency: 2.8
    Chambers: 5
    Costs: 580 Copper, 46 Tin, 242 Iron 40 gold
    Running Costs: None.


    It's 5 EU/t less than the current contender for this slot, but has higher Efficiency and costs less to create. In particular, you save about a hundred copper and there's a significant savings in gold as well, although you'll see a reduction in everything. Also, it's only a five-chamber reactor, which helps explain some of the cost mitigation.


    Also:


    1 Chamber No Running Cost


    EU/t: 120
    Efficiency: 3.0
    Costs: 260 Copper, 144 Iron, 40 Tin, 16 Gold
    Running Costs: 0


    This competes with both 0 Chamber Reactors in terms of power output and efficiency, but has zero running costs in exchange for a slightly higher initial cost. Very handy for penny-pinchers who want a budget reactor with no running costs.

    I don't know why people are so bothered by running costs. Its only an advantage if it leads to a higher overall efficiency, which it doesn't in the case of your 1st reactor. Granted, it does for the second reactor, but there's probably a design out there with higher overall efficiency by using multiple cells.

    Quote from hausfath

    Anyone have a good suggestion for a relatively cheap thorium-based breeder (to start off my nuclear production) that works with Gregtech's new thorium behavior? I'm on a world where the old 8x depleted isotopes per uranium is still enabled to help keep nuclear viable vs MFR tree farms and spammed boilers.


    You could try this: http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…vmiivu9waot76tfdu7ydkldkw


    It's not the cheapest there is out there, but as a 1-chmber it's reasonably inexpensive compared to fullsize reactors, and it's fairly powerful and very scalable. It should charge 220 isotopes per single thorium cell. The heat output for thorium was reduced, so it will put out only 12 instead of 15 heat in this configuration, which is exactly compensated by the single vent. If you want to upgrade this, all you need to do is add an additional chamber, fill it to the brim with plating, and then increase the number of heating cells to hit your new heat allowance. With 4 chambers, this hits the maximum 64 heating cells possible (and thus the maximum possible breeding speed for a single cell), and with 6 chambers it even stops hurting you while you stand next to it - or alternatively allows you to fit a second single thorium cell + 4 isotopes in there.



    I really like that design, that's indeed a significant improvement. You rarely see one of the listed designs get shot down as hard as this :D


    Quote from Shakie666

    I don't know why people are so bothered by running costs. Its only an advantage if it leads to a higher overall efficiency, which it doesn't in the case of your 1st reactor. Granted, it does for the second reactor, but there's probably a design out there with higher overall efficiency by using multiple cells.


    Because it can add up severely for people who play without GregTech. Direwolf20 discovered this the hard way with his lapis condensator reactor. He ended up having bigger issues trying to come up with enough copper than coming up with enough lapis. It cost him 720 copper every 2 hours 46 minutes.


    Now if you step back a moment and stop taking Mystcraft mining ages, Redpower frame tunnelbores, turtle armies, lava centrifuges and tesseract quarries for granted (because not everyone plays FTB ultimate, and not everyone has access to these technologies or even knows they exist), you can see why running costs might be daunting for some people. The zero running cost reactors are there as one option among many, not as the one end-all solution.

    Quote from Omicron

    Because it can add up severely for people who play without GregTech. Direwolf20 discovered this the hard way with his lapis condensator reactor. He ended up having bigger issues trying to come up with enough copper than coming up with enough lapis. It cost him 720 copper every 2 hours 46 minutes.


    Now if you step back a moment and stop taking Mystcraft mining ages, Redpower frame tunnelbores, turtle armies, lava centrifuges and tesseract quarries for granted (because not everyone plays FTB ultimate, and not everyone has access to these technologies or even knows they exist), you can see why running costs might be daunting for some people. The zero running cost reactors are there as one option among many, not as the one end-all solution.

    What I meant is the copper costs of multi-cell reactors is made up for by the extra energy. If you used some of that extra energy to make copper out of UU matter then you'd still get more energy overall (at least I think thats what it means by overall eff). Of course in GT UU matter is more expensive so it doesn't apply there, but you can always centrfuge lava (though that can causes its own problems).

    Quote from Shakie666

    What I meant is the copper costs of multi-cell reactors is made up for by the extra energy. If you used some of that extra energy to make copper out of UU matter then you'd still get more energy overall (at least I think thats what it means by overall eff). Of course in GT UU matter is more expensive so it doesn't apply there, but you can always centrfuge lava (though that can causes its own problems).


    Also, spending UUM on Copper will reduce your effective Efficiency rating as you end up having less EU out of the cycle once you calculate in the EU cost of the UUM. And not everyone enjoys having to have a MassFab up in order to run a reactor.


    Also, the second reactor was an attempt at making a budget reactor for my 'tower of power' build. Sure, 60 copper a cycle may not sound like much... until you multiply that by 40. Then you are looking at 2,400 copper per cycle. Ewwww. And it is the smallest viable zero-running-cost reactor design I've seen. I don't think anyone else has managed a single-chamber zero cost reactor that produces 120 EU/t, anyways.