EA* Plutonium Reactor

In my ongoing quest for higher efficiencies out of my reactors, I wanted to build a EA* Plutonium reactor. This was a challenge, as it required a quad plutonium cell, surrounded by neutron reflectors, which produces an immense amount of heat. After several tries, and some melted components, I met with success.

I am using a modified FTB Unleashed modpack, including IC2 1.116.364 and gregtech. For whatever reason, my plutonium cells produce exactly twice the heat of uranium cells, contrary to what the reactor planner predicts, so bear with my plans saying they overheat. I have run this reactor design for over 72 hours of realtime operation without a problem.

This is the reactor design
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…juyskpzcwjbhjj6ieaj1513b4

The 25 Overclocked Heat Vents barely take out the 896 heat/t, with 4 heat to spare. However, they can only dissipate 500 of said heat. Another 32 heat/t goes into the pair of Component Heat Vents. This still leaves a considerable 364 heat/t that gets funneled into the Coolant cells by the Component Heat Exchangers. From here I've used Applied Energistics to automatically remove the coolant cells when they fall below 50% durability, at which point they are placed into a cooling tower from this thread:
Does This work? (Various Cooling Tower designs)
Which has an overall cooling capacity of 480 heat/t, more than sufficient for our needs.

Further Notes:

This design is not cheap (requiring what amounts to 2 full reactors of materials, plus 4 iridium plates), but my goal was much more about eu/plutonium than anything else. In fact, the added power needed for the Applied Energistics system ends up amounting to almost half of the added power over a more conventional EA++ design reactor.

The reason I remove the Coolant Cells at 50% heat, as opposed to a higher amount, is because the surrounding components invariable get heated slightly more, as the heat exchangers are neither perfect nor instantaneous. I had a previous setup melt, when I tried to leave my coolant cells in until 80% heat. All of the cooling components sit at around 50% heat capacity during normal operating conditions. The coolant cells in the top left and right positions get cycled slightly faster, as they are handling 96 heat/t, while the lower cells are getting 64 heat/t. This is part of the reason I don't cycle the cells based of a clock, but instead swap out cells individually. The cells are cycled out of the cooling tower when they fall below 2% heat, to avoid strange effects at very low heat values.

The 5 separate cooling sections of the reactor are all cooled independently. This has no real benefit, besides allowing the design to fit in a full 25 Overclocked Heat Vents.

The component heat exchangers do have a limit to what they can handle. However, the highest stress exchangers only need to handle 28 heat/t/face.

This shows the reactor running. I used NaK coolant cells instead of water cells, because I was initially using a vacuum freezer to cool cells (until I realized how much power that was wasting).

Quote from Fallen_dead

I would have to run the numbers to be sure but; I think if you upgrade your coolant cells to their biggest size and then run them in a freezer then it should lower your overhead running cost.

I actually started out with 360k Helium coolant cells. The vacuum freezer scales differently for water/helium/nak cells, but overall the time used is:
2 kHeat/Second (Water cells), 2.4 kHeat/Second (NaK cells) and 1.71/1.80/1.85 kHeat/Second (60/180/360K Helium cells). So larger cells don't really help that much, if you're using a freezer. But larger cells would make me need to cycle the cells to the cooling tower less often, which would indeed save some power. I mostly used the smaller 60k cells because I didn't have enough Potassium or Helium.

Quote from Shakie666

I've been unable to come up with a reliable way of removing and replacing the cells correctly.

I use Factorization routers for inserting fuel cells, and removing coolant cells that accidentally get placed in the fuel slot when the plutonium runs out. Routers can selectively input or output to specific inventory slots in reactors, which is very handy (slots 0-53, going left to right, then top to bottom, treating reactors with less than 6 chambers as full sized reactors, with the extra slots piled on top of each other in the right-hand column). They can get expensive if you need item filters, though, plus you need a different router for every slot.

Omicron: I agree entirely about using Thorium reactors in parallel. I have 10 set up in my world right now, using:
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…uii2mi6vc00eq1tcgc546x1j4
Which only has an efficiency of 5.67 (and probably is over-engineered on the cooling, due to the aforementioned discrepancies with gregtech), and uses single cells as pseudo-neutron reflectors. The reasons I didn't use Thorium reflectors for the plutonium design were that first, I had the iridium on hand due to quarrying out huge areas of a mystcraft age, second, the extra heat would have actually been slightly more than my design could handle (9.6 heat being greater than the 4 extra I have), though I could have handled that by replacing the component heat vents with reactor heat vents, and lastly I just liked the idea of a 'perfect' efficiency plutonium reactor.