Name of Suggestion: well I guess it doesn't have a name, but basically I suggest we make some of the ideas of "industrial-craft" more realistic particularly pertaining to power generation
To start things off I think that the nuclear reactor if it were to overheat it should just melt down along with its adjacent blocks and just become a new block that is unusable and unmovable.
for a name for the block it can either be called, "Damaged Fuel", "Molten core", or "elephants foot" (nickname for the melted core of Chernobyl)
and while i am at it i am just going to share some ideas that i have brainstormed but haven't came up with recipes for. (not only that but i don't know how possible they are to implement)
I guess before i proceed any further, i should admit i am a noob to this mod and i just started playing with it.
I noticed that there are a plethora of things that can utilize pipes. pump compressor generator nuclear reactor etc. I have no idea if making pipe is possible because i have never made a mod for minecraft but i figure that it could be similar to a dispenser expect that it can dispense the item(water) a distance away depending on how many pipes you connect. a pump can pick up water and dispenser can release it so it seems possible. The reason why I want pipes though is much bigger. I imagine a redesign of blocks such as generator and nuclear reactor. instead of putting something in a generator and just getting power you would need to provide relative motion to the generator to provide power and the way you would do that would be a new block called turbine. A turbine would spin and if connected to the generator would in turn spin the generator providing power. But wait how is this making power one might ask, well what makes a generator? and what does it do? a generator converts mechanical energy to electrical energy. A generator needs three things: conductive material, relative motion, and a magnetic field. we have a conductive material and relative motion but we still need a field which means we need DC power so we need another new block made from batteries and circuits or something called the exciter. OK so now we need to make sure our turbine is turning to provide that relative motion so how do we turn it? Steam! i imagine that the way to implement this in game would be to have pipes connected to the turbine and use a pump to send water through it but only will work if the water had some energy worked on it first so that it is steam so we need a energy source... This is were a new block called a Boiler comes in. this can use coal etc to heat water that is sent through it with pipe. Or we can use a nuclear reactor. and btw the boiler and reactor would be bigger than one block so you can make them varying sizes for more steam or hold more fuel etc. Now where are we lets get back on track so we have steam to turn a turbine to turn our excited generator so it will provide power(btw as long as the generator is running it doesn't need the exciter it only needs to it start up) now we have steam with less energy exiting our turbine and we need more water to go into our boiler so what do we do? next new multi-block component is the condenser which is essentially a heat exchanger. so steam goes in and turns back into water, this will be built by the same material that built our boiler but this time we make it bigger and have pipes go though it and connect to a block called pipe coil. through these pipes we will pump water from a large water source such a lake or ocean or back and forth from a cooling tower. WAIT A COOLING WHAT? yes we can use our pumps to pump the water with low energy through our coil which will interact with its adjacent blocks of steam to condense the steam and warm of the water and then pump that water up to a tower we build and spray it down through spray nozels it will rain down cooling to through natural convection so we can send it back through to cool more steam. seems like the boiler method of power generation makes sense but what about this nuclear reactor? Well we will build a vessel not unlike the boiler we built but this time it is build a stronger material more resistant to the effects of radiation and inside we will put new block fuel rods in, that are crafted from the same stronger material to and enriched uranium but also we will put control rods in. think of fuel rods and control rods as polar opposites, fuel makes more neutrons control rods take away neutrons. control rods will be our way of controlling the reactor and shutting it down, when we build them on top of pistons wired with redstone so can remotely shove them into the reactor to shutdown. I explained what would be in the reactor but how do we get energy to ad to our water and make steam for the turbine? well we all know that uranium itself doesn't just boil water and not even enriched uranium will do that either, but why not? we need to provide a thermal neutron source to start the nuclear reaction of course, so we need to make a particle accelerator to bombard the new mineral berkelium-249 with neutrons till we make californium-250 then bombard that with neutrons to create californium-251, And that is our thermal neutron source. so when you are ready to start the reactor just drop that in there and the reaction begins. Now enriched uranium has about 3-5 percent U235 which is the fissle isotope we like but the rest of that is U238 so what happens to that? well there are what we call breeder reactors that utilize the fast neutrons to change U238 (through a couple beta decays or so) into plutonium239 which is another fissle isotope so you get more energy for your fuel. which is a good thing. btw since the u235 is a low percentage this means that a nuclear reactor can't have a nuclear explosion like a nuclear bomb can which uses more like 85 percent or greater.
anyway I just wish I can build a functional Nuclear plant in minecraft mostly because I recently got a job at one.
EDIT
One block machines
Boiler
Turbine
boiler will take the coal or other source to burn and connect pipe to it thatis transporting water
the turbine connects with generator and pipe coming from boiler
then the generator will simply provide power ass long as boiler is running, after fuel source burns up in boiler there will be a delay on boiling the water at the start but after the fuel is all gone the boiler will stay on(or keep generating steam) for the time that it took to heat it up in the first place.
I am thinking bucket on top of machine block on top of stove for crafting a boiler Or a stove surrounded by buckets or something like that
and for the turbine it can be a waterwheel surrounded by refined iron or maybe 3 water wheels horizontaly and 3 refined iron on top and bottom
or a waterwheel combined with a windmill
