Using Coolant Cells as Single Use Coolant

  • It was mentioned somewhere in the DDoS thread that, instead of cycling coolant between the reactor and a cooling tower, spent coolant could be destroyed and new cells made from UU-matter. I decided to give this a shot.


    As a test reactor, I used this design. 16 coolant cells, the same number of quad uranium cells, 1920 EU/t, 30 seconds before things start melting. Before all the coolant cells melt simultaneously, in fact.


    Based on the facts that the reactor burns 16 coolant cells every 30 seconds, and that one coolant cell requires four tin (I'm using buckets of water to craft coolant cells, not water cells, which saves a little tin), and that the standard amplified Mass Fabricator cost of one UU-matter is 166667 EU, I calculate that the reactor must generate at least 5333 EU/t, not even counting the energy required to generate scrap (or other amplifiers) for the mass fab, or that required to smelt the tin dust into ingots. Not even close to what this reactor provides. However, I didn't actually go all the way through with the calculations (without errors) until I began writing this post.
    A few miscalculations and similar sorts of confusions on my part thus led me to believe that this system might actually work, so I went ahead with setting it up in a test world.


    As I am using GregTech, I initially used the Matter Fabricator with its 16666667 EU per UU-matter in place of the Mass Fab, but I quickly realized that it wasn't going to come close to working. So, I switched to the Mass Fab. Cheatery, I know, but it had to be done.


    The setup included several RedPower relays feeding fresh coolant cells into the reactor as they melted. This leads to no heat buildup, if everything works properly- but even if some heat does escape into the reactor hull, the Overclocked Heat Vents take care of it rather quickly. And a Nuclear Control setup shuts off the reactor automatically if something does go wrong.


    I found that, as the math would've predicted had I done it correctly, the buffer of coolant cells decreased over time, which would eventually lead to the reactor running out of coolant.


    In short, it seems that coolant cells make for very poor single-use coolant. This strategy would only be worthwhile if you can manage to get more than four times as much EU out of a reactor as heat. No CASUC reactors here.


    That said, if anyone can come up with a way to actually generate EU using these methods, I would very much like to see it. I have a feeling that it would consist of a modified recent-generation DDoS reactor.

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  • at the same time you can just pull the coolant cells at second 29 out of the reaktor an cool them down again= save all the tin and the processing power of the reaktor.


    and what you just said summs up to one type of reaktor: CASUCS
    yes it is one of the last species of CASUCS that can to this day sustainthemselves.

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  • skavier470: I'm fully aware that the coolant cells could be cooled in another reactor and re-used- I said that I got this idea from reading the DDoS thread, did I not? My point in this thread was to test whether or not simply destroying coolant cells was feasible.
    And I don't see how my work leads to a functional CASUC- the Constantly Applied Single Use Coolant costs more EU than the reactor provides, does it not?


    @ShneekyTheLost: I was previously unaware of the existence of that conference, and it was indeed rather informative. However, I still haven't seen anyone test the feasibility of burning coolant.


    But the question of whether or not NaK coolant cells might still work is still in the air, and I don't seem to have time now to run the math on that. I'm starting to think not... because the only ways to get potassium are from enderpearls and saltpeter, and enderpearls are rather expensive on the UU-matter. And I don't really want to power a nuclear reactor with an enderman farm. Hmm...

    If you stare at my avatar hard enough, you'll notice that it consists of three triangular rings, interlocked in such a way that if you were to remove any one of them, the other two would be free to float apart.

  • an enderman farm is necessary for the fusion reactor anyway, and you get tons of potassium as a byproduct. you can also get tin from lava, which conveniently also gives copper for your quad cells.

  • The question is, is the lava worth the reactor? I did the math for some of the higher copper cost reactors and it isn't always so (it takes 80 million EU worth of lava to run the 4 reflector 1 quad reactor through a single cycle, which gets 24 million EU).

  • Lava won't be worth the tin.


    Assuming NaK cells and a plutonium efficiency 6 design, you need 251.4 cells per plutonium quad cell each cycle, that comes to 2,262.6 tin, or 18,100.8 buckets of lava, enough to make 543 million EU. You get 96 million EU in return.


    Might work better with vanilla IC2 and a fabber, iirc, its 3 UUM of 5 tin ore, assuming you use TE to triple instead of double the tin ore output thats 33,333.2 EU per tin. You need four tin per coolant so that comes to... 10,726 tin or 357.5 million EU for a reactor that outputs 192 million EU.


    Yeah, not viable.

  • Seems that generating enough lava via the Lava Fabricator from Minefactory Reloaded to produce the tin necessary for my test reactor (without accounting for the EU needed to centrifuge the lava), running quad uranium cells and 10k coolant cells, would require over 42 thousand EU/t.


    However, Kenken244, you probably meant draining the nether or a Mystcraft age for virtually free lava, to centrifuge into tin.


    The four tin for one coolant cell thus cost 100,000 EU. Thus, running the centrifuges alone would require 2666 EU/t. Still energy-negative, but not as much so as the UU-matter route.


    So that leaves us with sodium and potassium. Two sodium cells (enough for one NaK coolant cell) can be obtained from electrolyzing 8 clay dust with 10,000 EU, plus 277777 EU for the clay (ignoring maceration costs) equals 287,777 EU. Again, using the now obviously cheaty mass fab UUM cost.


    For potassium: I'll assume that you have a reliable, high-output enderman farm. 65,000 EU and 16 enderpearl dust in the electrolyzer gives four potassium cells, twice as many as needed for one NaK coolant cell. So, ignoring maceration costs again, you'll need 32,500 EU for the sodium.


    Thus, each NaK coolant cell costs 100,000 EU + 287,777 EU + 32,500 EU = 420,277 EU. Each of these cells lasts nearly 3 minutes (179 seconds, to be exact) in the reactor- so it must produce at least 1878 EU/t. Which it does- barely. The whole rig constantly consumes external lava, as well as uranium and enderpearls, produces copper, electrum, tungsten, nitrogen, berylium, chlorite, lithium, silicon, aluminium, and a whopping 42 EU/t.


    Less if we include the energy required to macerate the clay and enderpearls, and much less if we use GregTech's matterfab instead of the mass fab.


    Which leaves us with helium coolant cells. Helium, as it turns out, is best obtained from nuclear fusion. And if you've got a fusion reactor, why did you need the entirely ridiculous nuke setup in the first place?


    Conclusion: While, according to these calculations, burning NaK coolant cells is technically energy-positive, you're better off just burning that lava in geothermal generators. Or using a coolant-swapping CRCS nuke setup and centrifuging the lava.

    If you stare at my avatar hard enough, you'll notice that it consists of three triangular rings, interlocked in such a way that if you were to remove any one of them, the other two would be free to float apart.

  • Here's your main problem...


    You're talking about building fairly expensive components, then destroying them. This results in a significant cost per cycle. It might hit a break-even point, or it might not, but you aren't going to see a lot of EU out of it as a net result, which is kind of the point of the system.


    Wheras a CRCS system might have an initial investment cost, its actual running and maintenance costs are fairly low, unless you start using NR's. Since you are recycling the coolant cells, you don't experience the massive losses inherent in a system you are describing.


    When I did the math, I was so utterly disappointed that I just threw up my hands and tried something else. I was never able to hit a break-even point, but I hadn't considered GregTech as an option to make materials with, and it was running fairly different back then anyways. I was looking at straight IC2 and MassFab EU costs.

  • Running costs are pretty reasonabe even with NRs as long as you have a big enough setup actually. 8 quads overcomes the energy (via UUM vanilla, or lava centrifuging with quad plutonium cells gregtech) needed to make quads nicely. Coal dust might get problematic eventually though.

  • Running costs are pretty reasonabe even with NRs as long as you have a big enough setup actually. 8 quads overcomes the energy (via UUM vanilla, or lava centrifuging with quad plutonium cells gregtech) needed to make quads nicely. Coal dust might get problematic eventually though.


    The key to looking at the profitability of NR's is doing a cost analysis of how many more EU you get out of them versus how much it costs to replace them.


    For example, in my single-chamber DDoS reactor, I've got eight quads and four NR's. Without NR's, I'm looking at 880 EU/t for a total output of 176M EU. With NR's, I'm looking at 960 EU/t for a total of 192M Eu. So I'm looking at 16M Eu difference per cycle, and 80 EU/t.


    I don't have my sheets on hand to tell me how many NR's it takes per full cycle, but basically if it costs you more than 16M EU to make one, then it probably wouldn't be economical. However, as I have stated before, the NR's are primarily there to equalize the thermal output to an even level and ensure that all cooling cells are treated equally.