Posts by Omicron

  • Alright, so: MOX reactor designs.

    Looking for MOX reactor designs? Click here to go to the list!





    In theory, MOX fuel:
    - has a lifetime of 5,000 seconds, half as much as uranium
    - has exactly the same base EU output, heat output and efficiency scaling values as uranium
    - generates more EU the closer to 100% heat the reactor is, up to x5 at 100%
    - generates more EU the higher the reactor's actual heat level is (scaling factor unknown, but smaller than heat%) (was a bug, got fixed)


    The takeaway:
    - 100% reactor heat is, shall we say, "slightly impractical". A more realistic number is x4.4 at 85% heat, or x3.8 at 70% heat (no hurt)
    - Neutron reflectors last two times as many cycles and yield much higher total EU bonuses, potentially making them cost effective for once
    - The reactor must maintain its heat level exactly in order to give good results; this can be harder than you think


    Why can it be harder than you think? Because even designs that on the surface have cooling power equal to heat output will actually be unable to run at heat levels greater than 0. That is because you also need to look at a number the planner won't tell you anything about, and that is core transfer rate. Many reactor designs involving overclocked vents can actually pull more heat from the hull per tick than they are capable of dissipating. This works fine so long as common uranium reactors run at zero heat, but start the system off with several thousand degrees and the cooling system will melt itself even though it seemed stable in the planner.


    The following components have core transfer rates:
    - Heat exchanger, 4 core transfer
    - Advanced heat exchanger, 8 core transfer
    - Reactor heat exchanger, 72 core transfer
    - Reactor heat vent, 5 core transfer
    - Overclocked heat vent, 36 core transfer


    The reactor vent has 5 cooling, and thus will keep itself perfectly balanced on its own. The three exchangers will only utilize their transfer rates in order to make their own temperature (and that of adjacent components) match the reactor hull. The overclocked vent, however, will always pull the full 36 if it can, and it only has 20 cooling of its own. It will melt itself given the chance. However, so long as we know these transfer rates, we can use these parts build a reactor that satisfies the requirements for running MOX fuel.


    The simplest reactors, of course, get away without using core transfer at all: sample 1, sample 2 from another thread
    They simply have the fuel rods transfer heat directly into an adjacent component that can accept heat. If such a component is available, the fuel rods will never transfer heat to the core. Thus the reactor will maintain its heat level perfectly, and all we have to worry about is to provide enough cooling. The downside, of course, is that you're either running fairly low efficiency numbers (every fuel rod side occupied by a cooling component is one you can't use for another fuel rod or a reflector), or you'll invariably need a CRCS system to refresh spent coolant cells. Also, advanced vents are very expensive.


    The other option is to deal with core transfer rate: sample 1, sample 2 that I just made to illustrate the point
    This results in much higher efficiency reactors, with the downside being that efficiency means heat, and heat means you need to spend a lot of room on components. Which means less room for plating, which means less total heat capacity, which means less of an output multiplier. The trick question here is whether or not there is a point at which you lose more output by removing heat plating than you get from building a higher efficiency reactor. Absolute heat level seems to be a much smaller multiplier than total heat percentage, but it needs to be examined.


    Another downside of this approach is the fact that if you switch the reactor off (or the fuel rods run out), then the reactor will cool itself down to 0 unless you remove all cooling components or swap the fuel rods quickly. If you're slow, you might end up having to re-heat the components, or even the whole reactor, for the next cycle.


    Design Q&A:
    - why does sample 1 work, the core transfer is higher than both heat output and available cooling! Answer: because the reactor heat exchanger only draws as much as it needs to keep itself at the same temperature as the hull. That means it will draw exactly as much as the cooling components steal from it each tick, which is exactly as much as the fuel rod pumps into the hull each tick.
    - why does sample 2 work, it has more cooling than heat output! Answer: because it only has enough core transfer to pull 168 heat per tick from the hull, even though the cooling system could handle 172. If it bothers you, you can move one of the component vents so it only touches one component instead of two... but then you lose THE SYMMETRY! MinecraftCow



    Please share your thoughts on the subject, and most importantly, your design ideas. Let's come up with a few that are worthy of a new section in the Official Reactor Design thread!

  • IC2Ex - Canning Machine and Nuclear Fuels.

    They're also the final destination of all nuclear fuel.


    Uranium reactors convert U-235 into plutonium and leave you with an excess of U-238. Eventually you will have enough plutonium for MOX fuel.


    MOX reactors then convert U-238 into plutonium, leaving nothing but more plutonium. MOX is fantastic - it gives huge EU/t, and you end up with more fuel than you started, not less! Considering that excess U-238 has no other use than this, it's basically free energy and you'd be stupid to go straight for RTGs and not run MOX cycles.


    Plutonium is the end product of all reactors, the "nuclear waste", so to speak. No reactor can consume plutonium alone, and it will keep piling up in your storage. Unless you keep mining new uranium ore, you will eventually run out of all uranium components... and if you do keep mining, then you'll only make your mountain of "useless" plutonium grow ever larger ever faster.


    The RTG is the answer: it's where you put your nuclear waste to rest after no reactor can use it anymore. Much preferrable IMHO to what we have IRL, where the bulk of reactor waste has no real use and needs to be buried in metal caskets deep in salt veins to avoid making your entire region uninhabitable for centuries. ;)

  • IC2 Expermental Feature Discussion

    Quote from SpwnX

    The best source of info is not DW20, wikis or other people, but yourself, in creative mode, debugging tools (GregTech Scanner is an amazing one) and the machines themselves.


    Stop being lazy and go test for your info, a secure one, that you can trust, as YOU gathered it. However if you fail to gather the info by yourself, it means it is either too complicated or just impossible without source code (aka detailed mechanics of certain machines, like the windmill generation formula).


    Thanks, I know how to test. I've written, among other things, an entire feature documentation for an undocumented power system before, from nothing but ingame testing - without debug tools. So much for being lazy, eh? Considering my limited free time, though, I thought I'd at least ask around if the data is already available before devoting an evening to it...


    Quote from LivingFood


    Also, I'm using an older build of experimental. 142 if I remember correctly, is there a way I can update my outdated version of ic2 on my server (this will also require a later forge version, and I'm not sure how to update that in a server) without breaking my current world? Currently I cannot scan anything in the scanner besides iridium. Dirt, Ores, Stone, nothing else works in my build.


    I started playing with IC2 Experimental from build #160 on, and have continually upgraded (currently running #231). Upgrading never broke anything, but in fact fixed and added a ton of things. I highly recommend updating.


    Make a backup copy of your world folder and just give it a whirl. I'm willing to bet nothing will break. You still won't be able to scan more than ores and minable items (I managed to find 16 different ones), but you'll for example see all the recipes in NEI, the canning machine actually works, there's all-new textures on almost everything and a lot of missing existing features have been re-added (and potentially tweaked).

  • IC2 Expermental Feature Discussion

    That doesn't look right. For starters, non-overclocked thermal centrifuge consumption is more like 30k EU than 25K. Also, its been said in Direwolf20's youtube series that the thermal centrifuge runs at 48 EU/t. And 25600 isn't divisible by 48...

  • IC2 Expermental Feature Discussion

    Say, does anybody have the process time and EU consumption figures for these machines in IC2 experimental?


    - Metalformer
    - Ore Washing Plant
    - Thermal Centrifuge
    - Canning Machine


    I'm trying to give myself an overview of overclocker scaling, but I need to know the base values to calculate anything.

  • Experimental Changes to Nuclear Engineering

    Rgarding capturing all the energy: remember that the transformers no longer output multiple packets down a line. The EV transformer can only send 2048 EU/t on the output side even if you're using a 8192 EU/t cable and multiple receiving MFSUs. It might possibly work that you can have multiple independent lines coming from the same transformer so it'll output more, but potentially you'll need multiple transformers as well. I haven't tested it yet.

  • Experimental Changes to Nuclear Engineering

    Hey, making a full quantum suit for yourself and possibly a few others will eat quite a bit.


    Now if only I could actually find some iridium ore myself... *piles 8 music disks, 12 diamond horse armor, 10 golden horse armor, 11 iron horse armor, 7 name tags, 15 saddles and 3 valiant drones from dungeon chests in the corner*

  • Experimental Changes to Nuclear Engineering

    Yeah, it's only EU that's ramping up. If heat output was variable, it would be near impossible to hit the equilibrium point without accidentally slipping over or under it.


    I've had a similar idea for a potential reactor as you did, though I'm not sure if I'll actually build it anytime soon. As "cheap and easy" as these look, the MOX fuel itself is actually insanely expensive. For the 16 cells in that setup, you would have to run 432 normal uranium fuel rods through a reactor. Even with large reactors, that takes quite a long time. By the time you can actually build the cells, the cost of the reactor is probably entirely irrelevant (at minimum you're going to have tons of components from your other reactors that you could be reusing).


    For comparison, in a legit world I have so far run two cycles of this and one cycle of this, and I do not even have enough plutonium for one MOX rod, much less 16.


    Thankfully the MOX rods, once you have them, will kind of recycle into themselves so long as you have enough U-238. That 2x2 quad MOX setup will consume roughly one hundred U-238 over one and a half hours.

  • Experimental Changes to Nuclear Engineering

    I've performed a few tests yesterday as well (though only a small number, due to limited free time), and my findings back up those of Speleomantes. There is definitely a correlation between maximum reactor heat capacity and EU output, but it doesn't seem linear at first glance. Diminishing returns at the high end? I need more data.


    As for the WTF effect described just above... ... ... okay, I got nothin'. WTF! :p

  • Experimental Changes to Nuclear Engineering

    It may potentially be an exact code snipped, but in any case it's not the entire math. It merely shows the heat scaling. There's a lot more than that involved in figuring out reactor EU output. Ignoring empiric data because you think you saw a formula is not a good idea.

  • Experimental Changes to Nuclear Engineering

    ...Ooooh! So that's why the results didn't line up! Many thanks Thunder :D


    That means you actually don't need heat plating at all to get full output. Which in turn means any design that's valid for uranium and has +/- 0 cooling factor automatically becomes valid for MOX fuel as well (with the caveat of OC vents and heat exchangers making it impossible to maintain heat between cycles).


    Obviously heat plating makes it easier to edge your reactor as close as possible to the maximum, of course. My my, what a dangerous game we shall be playing...

  • Experimental Changes to Nuclear Engineering

    Awesome breakdown, Speleomantes.


    I'm scratching my head a bit at the data, though. Trying to map out the relationship between heat and MOX efficiency:


    T=00,000: efficiency x1.0, runtime x0.5
    T=50,000: efficiency x5.8, runtime x0.5
    T=77,000: efficiency x7.1, runtime x0.5
    T=78,000: efficiency x8.4, runtime x0.5
    T=90,000: efficiency x7.1, runtime x0.5


    That doesn't make any mathematical sense whatsoever! :wacko: We see a trend towards higher output with higher temperatures, but even at virtually the same temperature (77k vs 78k) the recorded numbers varied by more than one full multiplier step. And at the high end it drops down.


    I need to think about this some more... and maybe make some extra data points myself.

  • EA* Plutonium Reactor

    Quote from fibrizzo

    (...) For whatever reason, my plutonium cells produce exactly twice the heat of uranium cells, contrary to what the reactor planner predicts (...)


    That's because the online reactor planner hasn't been updated beyond GregTech versions 2.8x or evenn earlier.


    I like your design, it thinks outside the box. As a cost-reduction step, you can try to replace the iridium reflectors with single thorium cells. The reactor planner gives you wrong numbers for that, too, but ingame in the computercube it should simulate properly. Doing so should add another 9.6 heat per second, which your cooling cells should be able to accept no problem, if the heat exchangers have enough transfer bandwidth left. In exchange, you gain another 8 EU/t, and you reduce the building cost of the reactor by, oh, about 1,800 pieces of UU-matter.


    As a next step, you should probably design a highly efficient thorium reactor as well. Because, unless you plan to meet your plutonium needs entirely from industrial grinding uranium ore (who knows, this reactor is slow enough to maybe make that possible), you will always end up with thorium on the side if you produce plutonium in the GregTech centrifuge. Because of this dual output nature of the processing recipe, you cannot simply go with the efficiency figures the reactor planner gives you anymore. Not using the thorium produced by the centrifuge will hurt your actual isotope efficiency quite a lot.


    Your reactor on its own here would have an isotope efficiency of just 5.58, for example, despite all the hoops you jump through. If you go and replace the iridium reflectors with single thorium cells from your centrifuge output, it not only makes the reactor cheaper, but also boosts efficiency to 5.74. And yet, the multi-reactor system described in the isotope efficiency post costs less to build than your reflector equipped reactor alone, not counting the cooling tower, has a combined output of 564 EU/t instead of just 280, and posts a combined isotope efficiency score of 5.83, which beats your design as well. And that is why you need a way to consume all that thorium! ;)


    Your design is rated at +16T/20k (16 extra thorium produced per cycle lasting 20k seconds), so you ideally need a thorium sink reactor rated at -20/25k, or -16/25k if you run with "thorium reflectors". Of course, a bigger sink works too, but it will be sitting idle every so often, waiting to fill up on thorium cells. That affects effective EU/t over time, but not efficiency. Multiple small sinks work as well, if that happens to work out for you.


    Ultimately, if you managed to burn all your plutonium at efficiency 7, and all your thorium at efficiency 7 as well (the maximum possible values), you would end up with an isotope efficiency of 8.38, a value so high that no common uranium reactor could ever dream of achieving it.