[Official] New Reactors design thread.

Quote from Chocohead

Bad bad bad. Use 220 so you only need 200hU per 1mb/t of water.

so whats funny is on my test rig 220 works (till i changed it as a test) .. and is reliable.. but for some reason my nuke wants 221 bar to do superheated and looks stable and reliable ( reproducable )

I managed ot use the 400 HU/t setup to get 2 turbine setups with fluid regulators to return the water to the tank.... and was getting out of the 400 hu/t 290-295 eu/t.. which i feel is stable..

does anyone have a idea of improving? the steam system setup? (i know i can get more hu/t with other reactor setups )

Ive been having some problem with the stability of the steam generators actually. Sometimes they stop working for some reason when at 221 bar and 2 mb at 400 Hu. The strange thing is that it is only when working with the hot coolant. My lava setup works like a charm and ive never had any problem with it. To get it running i usuall have to get stable operation at 1 mb per tick and then increase it to 2 mb per tick or it just produces steam even when it has all the hot coolant it needs.

Lava setup 300 eu/tick with ender io and buildcraft
http://prntscr.com/4q9fcj

Mementh: I think its an optimal setup using only ic2. If you use some other mod that is good at moving fluids you can make setups that inputs 400 HU per steam generator. which makes the setup a lot cheaper since you need only about half the equipment (still need as many liquid heat exchangers). Ive used both ender io fluid pipes and steve's factory manager to great sucess.

My current setup looks like this using steve's factory manager:

http://prntscr.com/4qgu4o

I i use 1200 Hu in 3 steam generators and the remaining 144 heat is used in stirling engines. At first i had 6 steam cycles with 200 Hu per steamcycle but this is A LOT better as there is a large difference in running cost and initial investment. its also a lot cleaner.

I prefer moving the coolant away from the reactor as i can then make a smaller reactor room out of reinforced stone and build the turbines outside. However if you like putting the turbines on the sides of the 5x5 you can also make a simular setup as you have done but with 400 Hu per side of the 5x5. Iv'e tested it in creative and it works just fine using ender io.

Edit: Scratch the stability thing, there is now nothing left of my poor reactor, lucky i enclosed it in reinforced stone, only the reactor broke and not my base. The reason for the breakdown was this

http://prntscr.com/4qj4yx

For some unknown reason the turbine stopped processing the overheated steam and boom went my reactor. Anyone else having similar problems? Im leaning more and more towards using stirlings for 5x5. Both kinetic steam turbines and steam generators are highly unstable and unless you have a safety system on your reactor it might just go boom. I wont make the same misstake again.

I also found another bug. As long as the steam generator is pumping water into blocks besides it (for instance 1 mb/tick of distilled water that is instantly put back) it will never loose heat. My steam generators stay at 375 degrees forever as long as i keep recycling distilled water.

Quote from Blackpalt

Ive been having some problem with the stability of the steam generators actually. Sometimes they stop working for some reason when at 221 bar and 2 mb at 400 Hu. The strange thing is that it is only when working with the hot coolant. My lava setup works like a charm and ive never had any problem with it. To get it running i usuall have to get stable operation at 1 mb per tick and then increase it to 2 mb per tick or it just produces steam even when it has all the hot coolant it needs.

Lava setup 300 eu/tick with ender io and buildcraft
http://prntscr.com/4q9fcj

Mementh: I think its an optimal setup using only ic2. If you use some other mod that is good at moving fluids you can make setups that inputs 400 HU per steam generator. which makes the setup a lot cheaper since you need only about half the equipment (still need as many liquid heat exchangers). Ive used both ender io fluid pipes and steve's factory manager to great sucess.

My current setup looks like this using steve's factory manager:

http://prntscr.com/4qgu4o

I i use 1200 Hu in 3 steam generators and the remaining 144 heat is used in stirling engines. At first i had 6 steam cycles with 200 Hu per steamcycle but this is A LOT better as there is a large difference in running cost and initial investment. its also a lot cleaner.

I prefer moving the coolant away from the reactor as i can then make a smaller reactor room out of reinforced stone and build the turbines outside. However if you like putting the turbines on the sides of the 5x5 you can also make a simular setup as you have done but with 400 Hu per side of the 5x5. Iv'e tested it in creative and it works just fine using ender io.

Edit: Scratch the stability thing, there is now nothing left of my poor reactor, lucky i enclosed it in reinforced stone, only the reactor broke and not my base. The reason for the breakdown was this

http://prntscr.com/4qj4yx

For some unknown reason the turbine stopped processing the overheated steam and boom went my reactor. Anyone else having similar problems? Im leaning more and more towards using stirlings for 5x5. Both kinetic steam turbines and steam generators are highly unstable and unless you have a safety system on your reactor it might just go boom. I wont make the same misstake again.

I also found another bug. As long as the steam generator is pumping water into blocks besides it (for instance 1 mb/tick of distilled water that is instantly put back) it will never loose heat. My steam generators stay at 375 degrees forever as long as i keep recycling distilled water.

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try my setup 221 pressure and 1 mb water.. seems to be stable? 2 heat exchangers since they literally can't do more then 100 hu/t that might be causing your issues?

you also need fluid upgrades in the turbines to empty them as things fill up ( should not have steam in the turbine like that)

both are supposed to work, i encountered the same problem with 1 mb. It happens when im out exploring. It exploded after i had a trip to the nether so im guessing it has something to do if the generator misses a tick or something. I do not need ejector upgrades in the steam turbines as im using steves factory manager to pull out all fluids. Iv'e tried using ejector upgrades but it makes no difference. My lava setup has been working without fluid ejector upgrades for at least 5 hours now without a problem. i could try increasing the pace at which steve's is pulling out fluids with i suppose. Right now im pulling every one second, maybe i should go with once per tick instead and se if that solves it.

Superheated steam or steam is not supposed to be able to accumilate in the kinetic steam turbines, they should be consumed as soon as they enter the turbine however all of my problems stem from either steam accumulating in the second reactor (this is not so bad cause it only waste distilled water and the cooling still works) This happens almost every time i step through a portal. Then it happened with the first turbine which shut of the cooling to the reactor which quickly resulted in an explosion. At least i have proper safety measurements for my new reactor.

Edit: Went to the nether and the same thing happened again, luckily the safety mechanism saved the reactor this time. For some reason the kinetic steam turbine bugged when i went throught the portal. This is strange considering ive chunkloaded my base. Really at loss at what could be the problem. This time the lava setup also failed so it seems to be steam generators/kinetic steam generators in general that has a problem

I think i have made a safety that works

http://prntscr.com/4qllew. I forcefully void all superheated steam and steam from the kinetic steam generators via steve's factory manager. This prevents the blockage that happens when i go through the nether portal and makes the process go smoothly. Since normaly no steam or superheated steam appears in the generator it does not affect its normal operation.

Quote from Joannou1

^^^
As a noob, I have been messing around with the designer all day..
After a lot of trial and error, I have created (the worlds first?) stable MK5 reactor.

MK5 - Designer

Outputs 340 EU/t
I think the efficiency is terrible, 2.4?
It's been running for over an hour now and no components are degrading.

I am not sure why this works, as the designer indicates a failure.
If anyone knows, leme know.

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One thing I notice is that in your screenshot, the bottom center slot is an overclocked heat vent, while in your design it's a reactor heat vent. Using IC2 build 645 and creative mode, I couldn't reproduce your results either way - that overclocked heat vent near the upper left degraded pretty fast.

did a "long" howto setup the reactor build video and how to make the coolant and such ( i made a few mistakes building but got it resolved)

its not a "short" video 50 mins but it shows everything i have picked up from here!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APWSfeI5QbA

It could be a bit shorter but it should give beginners the information they need to get started with the reactors which is no easy task as it is now. Even learned a few things myself, didnt even know you could make distilled water slowly with solar power, ive added that to my setup to make sure i dont loose any distilled water in the setup.

Nice effort!

Quote from Blackpalt

It could be a bit shorter but it should give beginners the information they need to get started with the reactors which is no easy task as it is now. Even learned a few things myself, didnt even know you could make distilled water slowly with solar power, ive added that to my setup to make sure i dont loose any distilled water in the setup.

Nice effort!

if i re-do it i will have all the mats ready and better prepared.. its just .. there is SO little info in a area and no way to show what is a working design!

how can you make distilled water other then with the solar options ( figure i am missing something i can add next time)

and the solar power deal powers what allows you to recover the distilled water automatically and not need to rely on any other source so that start up does not have issues

I meant the solar destilation of water, not the solar power.

The method ive used to create distilled water is a bit wastefull but it works and its also quite fast. I just built a electric heater that boils water in a steam generator. it produces 20 mb of distilled water per second per 100 Hu. Ofc you could add more heaters to make it even faster. ofc you don't have to run it on electricity as you could just as easily run it on lava. However its more convenient for me since i have a very large power production.

You could add a turbines to be less wastefull of the energy. a single turbine would return 50% of the investment which is quite nice. However if you use lava there i really wouldn't be that concerned with wasting lava

There is also a thing that has to be considered when using a combination of stirling engines and steam. Unless the heat of the reactor can be evenly divided by 20 (if you have 40 excess heat you use 4 heat conduits etc) you need some kind of dense mode cabling to transfer the hot coolant to the liquid heat exchangers. Unless you put the liquid heat exchanger using stirling on a lower priority than the ones using steam it will try to split the hot coolant evenly between the steam cycles and the stirling cycles and you will end up with either to much hot colant or to little which will screw upp your steam cycles. The only mods that can do that i know of is steves factory manager and thermal expansion cables.

Quote from Blackpalt

I meant the solar destilation of water, not the solar power.

The method ive used to create distilled water is a bit wastefull but it works and its also quite fast. I just built a electric heater that boils water in a steam generator. it produces 20 mb of distilled water per second per 100 Hu. Ofc you could add more heaters to make it even faster. ofc you don't have to run it on electricity as you could just as easily run it on lava. However its more convenient for me since i have a very large power production.

You could add a turbines to be less wastefull of the energy. a single turbine would return 50% of the investment which is quite nice. However if you use lava there i really wouldn't be that concerned with wasting lava

There is also a thing that has to be considered when using a combination of stirling engines and steam. Unless the heat of the reactor can be evenly divided by 20 (if you have 40 excess heat you use 4 heat conduits etc) you need some kind of dense mode cabling to transfer the hot coolant to the liquid heat exchangers. Unless you put the liquid heat exchanger using stirling on a lower priority than the ones using steam it will try to split the hot coolant evenly between the steam cycles and the stirling cycles and you will end up with either to much hot colant or to little which will screw upp your steam cycles. The only mods that can do that i know of is steves factory manager and thermal expansion cables.

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actually its 10 hu/t to consider each heat conductor is 10 hu/t removed.. so any multiple of 10 can work if its STABLE.. IE no flux or very little

and your method works.. but burns a steam generator up as you said. it will calcify quickly

They work in set of two. Even thought it says it can transfer 50 heat with five it actually transfers 40. it can transfer even 20, 40, 60, 80 and 100 in practice. The calcification is slow enough that it does not matter much. I think it calcifies completly after 100 buckets of water or 100 buckets of distilled water or 5000 seconds or so in my case. at 100 % calcification the process stops but nothing is damaged and it stops transfering heat to the steam generator. You can then resett the steam generator again by just picking it up and placing it down again.

Playing around with mark 5 mox reactors made me think there really isn't a reason why you cant do this with the regular reactors as well. since you need on/off regulation on the reactor anyways with the instability of the steam cycle ive been thinking of rebuilding my current reactor into this

http://prntscr.com/4qsm9n

The setup is extremly easy

http://prntscr.com/4qsdu2

As usual the efficiency is really good. Each reactor tic produce 2944 heat with roughly 1362-1370 (it varies a bit) cooling which makes it about 1 second on and 1½ second off on avarage. It should produce about 980 eu per tick using a combined superheated steam/stirling setup which is the highest power output ive managed to reach so far with a 5x5 reactor

I also want to point out something i'm not sure everyone picked up yet. High efficiency reactors are way superior in 5x5 reactors than in regular reactors. The usual balance with EU nuclear reactors is that higher efficiency reactors produce lower power as they have higher heat/eu. However for the 5x5 reactor what is producing power is the actual cooling capacity of the reactor and the efficiency depends on how much heat the reactor produces per tic. One good case is comparing these two reactors

http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…adh05nlzbpykw84kwczan05q8
efficiency: 4.67
eu output: 280
Heat produced: 640

http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…00drdsvntps8fdm4xmr3ydlhc
efficiency: 3
eu output: 420
Heat produced: 672

Althought in eu mode, the second low efficiency reactor is vastly superior to the high efficiency reactor in output. This is not true for the 5x5 reactor. I've tested both these reactors in survival and the first high efficiency reactor produces 1280 heat/s (640*2) while the second one produces 1344 Hu/s (672*2). This means they are almost equal in power output but the higher efficiency reactor uses only 12 fuel rods while the low efficiency one uses 28 fuel rods. That means in the 5x5 reactor the high efficiency reactor is more than twice as effective as the low efficiency reactor while in eu mode it is only about 50% more efficient.

TL DR:
High efficiency reactor designs are almost always better than low efficiency ones in pretty much every aspect. They are just plain better and low efficiency designs should be avoided in the 5x5 unless you want plutonium

Quote from Blackpalt

They work in set of two. Even thought it says it can transfer 50 heat with five it actually transfers 40. it can transfer even 20, 40, 60, 80 and 100 in practice. The calcification is slow enough that it does not matter much. I think it calcifies completly after 100 buckets of water or 100 buckets of distilled water or 5000 seconds or so in my case. at 100 % calcification the process stops but nothing is damaged and it stops transfering heat to the steam generator. You can then resett the steam generator again by just picking it up and placing it down again.

did not realize that about the heat.. wonder why that is..

and the calcification reset should be a bug.. you should report that ( make sure your picking i up in survival and not creative)

Quote from Chocohead

No, it's meant to just be placed back down to fix it. It's designed to push you to use distilled water or maintain your water powered turbines (I think).

interesting .. just don't let it get to 100% ? or ?

i think if it has a reset option then there is no reason to have a SLOW solar distiller it makes little sense..

or make it so the boiler only takes distilled water.

there is imho a balance issue.. either its too easy to make with another boiler and clean up by removing or solar distiller needs to be faster

Quote from Chocohead

Pretty much.

Solar Distiller takes 1 hour to turn 1 bucket of water into 1 bucket of distilled water in a normal temperature biome. Breaking and replacing it to fix it is a pain, so distilled water is much better. Why does the solar distiller need to be faster?

thats 3 days in game to make 1 bucket vs a few moments with a easy pick up and remove ( if your at that level making nukes you have the best backpack and can afford to waste 9k eu)

How expensive materially is that solar distiller?

It seems to me that if 1 is too slow, you can just make more of them.

To put things into perspektive, to produce distilled water as fast as one electric heat generator and one steam generator you would need 72 solar distillers. Considering it would also need some kind of automation and piping and its only working 50% of the time i think i still would prefer to use a steam generator/condenser setup simply to save space and time.