Posts by Someone Else 37

  • Trying my hand at breeder design


    So thorium now breeds at the same rate as uranium, but produces a lot less heat... Interesting...
    So I guess it's back to the old thorium-powered breeders, then? Longer burn time than uranium plus less heat per tick (and thus less cooling, more heat plating) equals more breeding between refuels, correct?


    Also, are thorium multicells more effective than single cells now?

  • Trying my hand at breeder design

    Quote from Shakie666

    Since its hard to test out breeder designs in the GT computer cube (due to the inability to stack heating cells), does anyone know how to make a fast breeder in GT 1.5?


    1. Right-click the heating cell in the reactor planner.
    2. Probably not by using thorium. If the changes in GT for 1.5 that I heard about a while back haven't been changed back, plutonium (especially multicells) might work even better than they did in GT for 1.4. Which means that fast GT breeders could be considered hybrid breeders, producing both re-enriched cells and EU.

  • Decentralized Distribution of Steam (DDoS)


    First off, you don't need a fuzzy bus if you only want import or export completely cooled cells (or completely emptied condensators)- precise busses work just as well for that purpose, and don't contain diamonds. Save your advanced processors for importing hot cells.


    Second, the thing that you feel is a bit off in my cooling tower design might be the lack of a component vent adjacent to the coolant cells. This is a feature I noticed in the other cooling tower designs that I removed so that there was more room for component exchangers to pull more heat out of the coolant cell.


    Third, I should probably explain how I got to the design I did. I replaced the coolant cells with heating cells, and adjusted the design until I maximized the number of heating cells in each stack without having anything build up heat and melt. Knowing that each heating cell in the stack inserts one heat into all of the adjacent components per second, a stack of 30 cells would insert 30 heat into each of the four component exchangers each second, thus the 120 heat per cell per second I spoke of earlier.


    I then copied the same design twice into a larger reactor, and found it worked with a few more heating cells in each stack.


    Edit: Testing indicates that this cooler design is really (!) slow when it comes to that last 30 heat or so. Thus, it is probably certainly a good idea to use a Fuzzy Bus to pull cells when they're 75% cool- so forget my comments about saving diamonds.

  • Tower of Power: CRCS Edition!


    I think the largest problem with your design is that you need to manually insert new uranium cells every few hours.
    However, I have a fix: Factorization Routers. I guess inventory turtles could do it as well, but I don't know LUA, so that's a bit out of the question for me.


    You'll need a total of 18 routers per tower of production reactors- each of which will need a machine filter upgrade. Painful, considering that each filter requires logic matrix takes 20 minutes to crystallize. Note that you can use lines of furnaces to connect the different towers. You'll probably want a Speed upgrade for each as well, but the other upgrades are probably not necessary.


    For large towers, this could actually be a significant reduction in cost- as you're completely eliminating the busses that insert coolant into the reactors.


    Organize your routers in-world into groups of nine. Make sure that routers in the same group share at least one face with another router in the same group (lines and squares work well), but don't touch routers in the other group.


    Connect an ME Precision Export Bus to one router in each group. Have one bus export quad uranium cells, and have the other export fully-cooled coolant cells.
    Configure each of these two routers to insert into nearby Item Routers. As a tip, the router is always the last machine listed in the Machine Filter GUI- so just right-click the "all machines in network" button to get it.


    Configure the other 16 routers to insert items into all nuclear reactors in the network. But, you need them to only insert into a different specific slot- this is where things get a little more complicated.


    Right-click the bottom button on the initial GUI page (the button that says "into South sides" or something similar) until it reads "into slot 0". Do this for all 16 routers.


    I'll start with the coolant-inserting routers. It doesn't matter what order you do the following, just that each router has a unique slot. Note that, in addition to clicking the plus and minus buttons, you can type numbers into the router directly, while your mouse cursor is hovering over the button.
    Leave the first router at slot zero.
    Set the second router to slot 3.
    Set the third router to slot 9.
    Set the fourth router to slot 12.
    Set the fifth router to slot 36.
    Set the sixth router to slot 39.
    Set the seventh router to slot 45.
    And, last but not least, set the eighth router to slot 48.


    Do the same on the eight uranium-distributing routers, but set one router to each of slots 1, 2, 10, 11, 37, 38, 46, and 47.


    Now, this system will be a little slower about distributing coolant cells. Which could lead to any one of a variety of problems, including missing heat vents, fires, hunger debuffs, or craters. However, I have a solution to this, as well, using yet another mod in place of MFR: Buildcraft 3.


    Instead of running a line of RedNet cables along the column of reactors, run a line of pipes of any sort. Personally, I would use Cobblestone Structure Pipes, but others could work as well.
    Along the whole length of the pipes, frol the farthest reactor to your on/off switch, run some Red Pipe Wire.
    On each block of pipe that touches a reactor, place an Iron And Gate. Configure each gate to "Inventory Full" >> "Redstone Signal" and "Red Pipe Signal On" >> "Redstone Signal".
    The mod GateCopy (included in FTB Unleashed, for your information) is very handy here.


    On the pipe adjacent to your power switch, place a gate configured to "Redstone Signal On" >> Red Pipe Signal.


    As a final note, the cooling can be very easily managed using a pair of routers. You'll need two machine filters, an item filter, a couple speed upgrades, and an Ejector upgrade.
    Have your Fuzzy Export Bus inject spent coolant cells into a router with just a machine filter and a speed uprgade, configured to insert items into all nukes in the network. Also make sure that no blocks with inventory slots (ME busses and cables don't count; nukes, chests, routers, and furnaces do) connect the cooling towers to the main production towers.


    Have the other router (with all four aforementioned upgrades) extract fully cooled coolant cells from the nukes (the item filter acts like a Precise Bus), and eject them into an ME Interface. I wouldn't use a bus here- the Interface will instantly deal with any items pumped into it, while no import bus can pull more than a few non-stackable items per second.


    Edit: Testing indicates that my cooling tower design is virtually incapable of eliminating the last 30 heat or so. Thus, forget all my comments about using routers to pull cooled cells and using precise busses for fully cooled cells. Use a fuzzy bus on each coolant tower to pull cells that are more than 75% cooled, and use another to put them into the routers for distribution into the production reactors.

  • Nuclear Tower of Power (7,200 EU/t)

    I've come up with a much more compact layout for the tower itself.
    Each 6x6 layer contains 8 RedNet cables, 4 glass fiber cables, and 12 separate 1-chamber reactors.
    This design doesn't leave any room for AE stuff though- but it works quite well using Factorization Routers to insert uranium cells and extract depleted cells. You'll need an item filter to prevent the second router from pulling the wrong stuff, which is a hassle to make, but two routers and a logic matrix PER TOWER are probably cheaper than all the AE components used by the OP. Even if you don't already have any Factorization infrastructure at all.


  • Decentralized Distribution of Steam (DDoS)

    Quote from Shakie666

    I hope no-one considers this a necrobump, but given how little activity this forum gets I don't think anyone will mind. I've been trying to get a CRCS system going with AE now that I have access to fuzzy buses. However, i'm not sure how to use them. I've tried them on different settings and with cooling cells with varying amounts of damage - every time it gets pulled out of the reactor. Unfortunately I can't just use precision buses because they look at the exact amount of heat stored, rather than the percentage heat as I originally thought. This means I have to use fuzzy buses. Could someone please explain how to use them in a CRCS setup?


    As a sidenote, plutonium is amazing for CRCS now. It produces 10 eu/t base and has the same efficiency scaling as uranium. However, it now only has a base heat of 8 rather than 10, meaning its stats are exactly double those of uranium. This basically means that as far as CRCS is concerned, there's no reason not to use plutonium (though of course you have to get enough of it together in the first place).


    For configuring a Fuzzy Import Bus to pull coolant cells:
    1. Grab a coolant cell that's almost dead. If there's more than one red pixel showing on the damage bar, it is less likely to work.
    2. Drop said coolant cell and a Near-Depleted Uranium cell into import bus interface.
    3. Set the button on the top right of the bus GUI to the 25% damage mode.
    4. Connect import bus to existing AE network.
    5. Drop a new (or otherwise completely cooled) coolant cell into reactor. If it gets pulled out, inject more heat into the hot cell and goto step 1.


    As a side note, I find Factorization Routers useful for inserting coolant cells and uranium/plutonium cells into banks of reactors. And Buildcraft is really handy for preventing explosions- instead of placing a lever on your production reactors, place a Cobblestone Structure Pipe with a red pipe wire and an iron AND gate. Set the gate to "Inventory Full" >> "Redstone Signal" and "Red Pipe Signal" >> "Redstone Signal". Use another gate to turn on the red pipe signal, keeping in mind that placing it adjacent to a gate that emits redstone may cause problems.


    Also, another side note, I *think* I've come up with some improved cooling tower designs. I'm not certain if these actually work, though.


    1. 1 chamber, cools 2 cells at 120 heat per cell per second, 240 heat per second total.


    2. 5 chambers, cools 4 cells at 124 heat per cell per second, 496 heat per second total. Basically the 1-chamber design stuffed twice into the same reactor- slightly cheaper than 1-chamber coolers, and a little faster as well.


    3. 6 chambers, cools 4 cells at 144 heat per second per cell, 576 heat per second total. If I'm correct, this hits the theoretical maximum rate for pulling heat from coolant cells using component heat exchangers. This again consists of two copies of the 1-chamber cooler stuffed into the same reactor, but with a few extra components in the middle to dissipate that last little bit of heat. I'm not sure how it compares to the five-chamber cooler in cost-efficiency terms, though.

  • Best breeder


    The first reactor uses no GregTech components, and thus is for those who don't have/use GregTech.
    The second reactor uses Thorium, which is from GregTech, which not everyone uses.


    Due to that, yeah, the second reactor is definitely the way to go, if you have GregTech. If you don't, you don't have the key ingredient.

  • [Official] New Reactors design thread.

    None of the breeder designs on the front page of this thread seem to be able to charge more than a few hundred isotopes per cycle.


    Well, I've managed to create a quad-thorium-powered breeder (which will probably break with Greg's 1.5.1 nerf) that manages to charge about 1759 isptopes in one rather long cycle.


    It runs at the highest possible temperature that a stack of heating cells can run. It will not cool down while burning thorium. It will, however, cool down (slowly) once turned off.


    I'm not sure how long this reactor takes to charge one set of four isotopes.


    There is VERY little room for error heat-wise. The heating cells will keep the reactor at 64000 heat, but at 64600 heat (only 600 more) the reactor will explode.


    I've also created a completely maintenance-free thorium-breeder, using a single cell:
    This one will go up to max temp (I added an extra heat-capacity plate for safety) and stay there until you remove the heating cell or the exchanger adjacent to it.


    It will even heat itself up to max temp before you turn it on.


    While running, the three reactor heat vents drain the exact amount of heat produced by the thorium cell. No temperature fluctuation at all. You could even add another chamber filled with heat-capacity plating and bump the heat a little higher by removing some of the heat vents, and it would stay there. That, however, is both dangerous and high-maintenance, which the reactor shown in the link isn't.


    I couldn't manage to put in two thorium cells surrounded with isotopes without burning out the heat exchanger.

  • Decentralized Distribution of Steam (DDoS)


    Wouldn't this design provide a little more cooling?
    Basically, I swapped the exchangers and component vents immediately above and below the top coolant cells with each other, so two of the component vents are adjacent to four components that store heat, thus giving a little more cooling potential.


    As to using golems... sounds promising at first, but keep in mind that they are living creatures, even if they are made from stone, forged on a stone table, and have souls typically extracted from helldirt. I doubt that, even with protective headgear, they could survive exposure to radiation for long.


    On second thought, CRCS reactors are typically run at low temperatures and cause little damage to their surroundings- but if one golem fails to do its job for even an instant, the reactor could quickly heat up and create a positive feedback loop by taking out the other golems. Then again, Buildcraft Co. has provided us with a very nifty solution to that problem as well.


    A second problem arises when one realizes that golems are surprisingly difficult to turn off- you don't want them to pull partially-heated coolant cells out of the reactor, or partially-cooled calls out of the cooling towers. Some sort of golem-Redpower hybrid system may be in order.


    However, I would be reluctant to leave any sort of living creature in charge of maintaining a reactor that cannot possibly cool itself in the case of a technical glitch. Adding a few Reactor Heat Vents to the reactor, perhaps adjacent to the cooling cells to avoid the direct heat of nuclear fission, may suffice.

  • Using Coolant Cells as Single Use Coolant

    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.

  • Using Coolant Cells as Single Use Coolant

    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...

  • 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.