Ok, now that I've gotten (partially) the hang of the "minigame" for reactor planning, here's the latest creation :
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…ymxri6yeufxrqgy53n15hzq4g
420 EU/tick. 6 chambers. 4.38 efficiency (as if that mattered)
And most importantly, 4.8 thorium for every plutonium! As long as you're running any modpack that has MFFS (bonus thorium) or some other source of extra thorium, this is perfect. You burn up almost all your fuel evenly.
MFFS gives 1 whole thorium for every single monazite ore found. That ore seems to be more common than uranium, but assuming it has the same rarity, then the math works perfectly.
Now, it does burn copper every cycle. The efficient place to get more copper is from lava - either from the nether or by melting it using a magma crucible. If you get it from the nether, the energy cost is negligible. Assuming you got it from a magma crucible, currently, that will eat up 54 million of the 420 million EU the reactor generates. You can "rate down" the EU/tick to 366 EU/tick.
However, Greg also recently changed the recipe for double/quad thorium cells. They now only require copper ingots, not plates. So 1/9 the copper, eliminating this as an issue.
How do you refuel the plutonium? Simple : use an electric advanced regulator. You just count : build the reactor, and figure out which slot number has which fuel component. For instance, the top quad thorium cell is slot 1 (slot 0 is the upper left). So stick a quad thorium cell in the middle holoslot of the regulator, and right click until the number for that slot is set to "1". Do the same for each additional component. For instance, the next quad thorium cell is in slot 10.
I'm still not a master at the minigame. Can someone take this reactor design and, leaving the fuel configuration alone, optimize the cooling components to minimize cost and/or complexity. I added a couple of component heat vents after I built the reactor in creative mode and noticed a couple hot spots.
Another thing to factor in is the efficiency per uranium. Every uranium you find, you can create 8 nearly depleted cells. Breed them, and you get 8 re-enriched cells. (that go in the centrifuge) You get, ultimately, 5.5 thorium and 1.375 plutonium from this uranium. You also get more lots of thorium from monazit ore, assuming the modpack you are playing has MFFS (virtually all of them do).
This means it costs 3.64 uranium ore to fuel this reactor, so you end up netting 115 million EU per uranium ore.
By contrast, if you do uranium breeding : with top notch breeding, you net about 9 uranium cells per uranium ore. (since you have a 25% chance of getting a nearly depleted every time you burn one, and you get 8 for every ore when you craft near depleted). Assuming a tip top efficient reactor, from the "designs" page, with an efficiency of 4, and you get 36 million EU per uranium ore.
Played the minigame some more. Did my best to "regularize" the layout inside the reactor to make it easier to build. Still not ideal, however. http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…cokn57z7w5n041a0dk5edyo74