Posts by lyplyp

Quote from gorzak

Are you dead set against using heating cells and plating? I'm curious as to why. Here is a design that has a cold start, but is utterly stable 10 single cell U, 3.6 efficiency with 1.4 cells per U. It will take auto replace machines (redpower retriever, transposer is what I use) for the isotopes & re-enriched. It heats after it turns on, stabilizes while running at right around 19k heat. 19.6k is the radiation threshold, so it is utterly safe. After it finishes it's fuel it starts to cool again. It doesn't need to be cold to start it again, it should be impossible to explode with infinite runs. If you restart it before it cools off, you will get better returns on breeding. If it cools off all the way, you get 1.4 per U, so still at replacement level. 2 stacks with stack size of 15 heating cells are the minimum to get replacement from that config, 19 gets 2 more cells bred without any additional consequences, and if you are ok with radiation, 23 is the maximum and gets you 2 more cells. Personally, I'm not a fan of radition, so I'd go with stack size 19 heating cells.

I'm not at all dead set against hot reactors; I just don't have any experience with them, and little to no success with my few experiments in the reactor planner. That's a very nice reactor you got there, with more efficiency and output than mine. Of course, it's running hot enough that parking it in the basement is probably a bad idea; a fire-proof reactor hall at some distance seems adviceable. The cell replacement system isn't very hard to build: I used a filter-retriever setup a while back to do the cell swaps on a breeder.

The cold breeder has a few advantages though: less architectural requirements, newbie friendly, and runs just fine without extra mods to do cell swaps. A hot hybrid also needs to run its full cycle; any interruptions will cool it down and ruin the breeding. A hybrid such as this hot design will need 4 MFSUs to receive all that power, unless you actually spend it all during the cycle - and I don't. A cold breeder on the other hand can pulse to top up an MFSU without any breeding loss, giving excellent continuous power with no effort. (though I recommend a second MFSU inline between reactor and main mfsu to catch the overflow energy that resuts from the reactor shutting down too slowly)

Seeing how you managed to get a 10-core reactor up though, I'm now curious and may have to start experimenting with hotter reactors.

lyp

Using thermal expansion's ore generation (dw20 pack) copper ore is surprisingly scarce. After realising that the last design actually needs 80 copper every time you restock the fuel cells, I felt the pain. New plan:

Taking a step back to single cells, I tried getting a 10-core reactor up, but simply failed to get the design stable. I was able to get an 8-core up though, using only 6 chambers. Obviously the production cost is significantly lower, as well as the running costs. The return to single cells also means the breeding time is precisely 1 cycle again - and this means you don't need a tube-system to feed the reactor cells during operation, making it very useful if you don't have mods with pipes or for those who are new to mods like that.

Exchanging the one plain heat vent for an overclocked one will turn this into a Mark-I, but the additional cost isn't really worth avoiding the less than two minutes of cooldown that you will need to restock the reactor anyway (but it might be useful if you automate refueling.)

Mark II-2 Breeder EA
Effective Output: 28Meu @140 eu/t ( 138.8 eu/t including 1:29 cooldown )
EU efficiency: 3.50
Cells charged per uranium cell: 1
Running costs: 0 UU
Production cost: 599 copper, 63 tin, 222 iron, 66 gold (569 UU)

lyplyp

Continuing the line of self-sufficient cold-breeding hybrids, here's the highest output I can manage - though this requires more maintenance as the depleted cells need to be replaced several times during the reactor's cycle. Obviously this would be best used with a piping system to auto-replace the cells. You can replace once of the overclocked vents with a normal vent, though this will technically make it a Mark II-E.

Mark I Breeder EA+
Effective Output: 38Meu @ 190eu/t
EU efficiency: 4.22
Cells charged per uranium cell: 1.1
Running costs: 24 UU
Production cost: 899 copper, 88 tin, 299 iron, 100 gold (807.5 UU)

lyplyp

I went straight from coal power to nuclear so I wanted a first reactor that was efficent, breeding enough to keep itself going indefinitely, had low maintenance, decent output, and that was fairly inexpensive to build as well as having minimal running costs. This is what I came up with. It's extremely convenient, breeding as much as it burns, giving it an effective uranium consumtion below 0.5 ingots per cycle. This reactor will cover all your needs, up to the point where you start massfabricating. I'm happily powering a fast buildcraft quarry on this via forestry's electric engine, and there's lots of power to spare. Since it finishes its breeding in precisely one cycle, it's very low maintenance. Just park it in your basement and flip the lever.

Mark 1 Breeder EA
Effective Output: 12Meu @ 60eu/t
EU efficiency: 3.00
Cells charged per uranium cell: 1
Running costs: 0 UU
Production cost: 310 copper, 28 tin, 122 iron, 36 gold, 2 diamonds (325 UU)

lyplyp

Quote from dezuman

Hmm? I used a design very similar to that one ages ago to breed, and it finished all 6 in one cycle ... Have you tested it?

Getting only 3 charged cells per used uran might seem wasteful, but given 0 micromanagement I'm fine with that
With a perfect breeder at over 9000 heat you can charge 8 cells per uran, but you pretty much has to be there at half-time to switch them out. And ofc you need to heat it up beforehand.

Edit: Unless there has been some major overhaul to nuclear power recently, that is

No, haven't tested. That's just something I whipped up in the planner as an example while writing the post. The planner says all the cells won't be done in one run, so I figured it was probably right (it seems accurate enough in most other respects). Maybe it isn't right. I haven't actually gotten around to building myself a breeder for real yet. I will at some point of course, and that will most likely be some kind of cold-starting mk2 breeder. Should prove interesting.

...and on the subject of breeding speed with regards to heat - you wouldn't happen to know how exactly heat influences breeding speed at various temps, 0-10k? It would be easier to determine the benefits of using a perfect heated breeder vs a mk2 thingee if I had that little nugget of data in my noggin.

lyplyp

Well, the program says neutral as in "heat level unchanged" I reckon - and the level is 0. Look at the general info tab, specifically at
- Total Cooling: 68
- Total Heat: 50
- Excess Heat: -18 (Brrr! Arctic!)

It's severely overcooled. Another design is necessary for a breeder, and you can get a much better efficiency out of it.

lyplyp

Of course the above breeder could be made super-effective by using a full cycle to heat it up, and then running it on a redstone timer, flicking it on and off to maintain the absurd heat level. I'm sure it'd breed very quickly under those conditions.

lyplyp

I'm sure the cells don't lose their charge, making a breeder reactor with cool down possible.The main reason people don't use them is that a reactor that's always burning hot is much, much more efficient (though I'm not sure exactly how much more so).

A cooldown breeder easiest to build and maintain of course, as you can cold-start it, and (assuming it's a Mk2) just let it run til it's out of fuel. Of course, a reactor like this is more effective the hotter it is, so it would probably make sense to make sure it's *just* about to explode when the fuel runs out. Unfortunately, that means a very long cooldown before you can safely cold-start it again. You will probably find that you need to run the reactor for 2 full cycles before the depleted cells are fully charged.

Something like this would work I think, giving you 2 fully charged cells per run, and another 4 every second run, for a total average of 4 recharged cells per run, at the cost of 2 uranium. The efficiency as you can see isn't very high.
Mark II-1 EA Positive Breeder

I'd be very interested to know how many batches of cells you could recharge in a berfect breeder, on a single cycle of uranium.

lyplyp

Mm, but those two don't actually do much in terms of actual breeding though. Not enough to refill the reactor by a long shot. And yes, the basic idea behind the breeder was to create a Lazy-Boy reactor. Not great in any way, but doing it all in one easy-to-manage core. I'm running a 120EU/t Mk2 now, and I'll probably end up complimenting it with a second reactor - a pure breeder.

But yea, I don't think enough changes can be done to my 3-U design to make it Mk2. More Uranium than that is definitely going to be an impossibility, at least with 2+ power efficiency.

Sure thing. Here's a functional one, 4-chamber, that I whipped up in 3-4 minutes. I'm sure it could be better/cheaper, but the point goes through:

Mk II-1 EA Positive Breeder

Points of interest:
1) Mark 2, cold-start: safe, easy, reliable, no advanced wiring, heating, etc. Easy as pie.
2) Self-replenishing breeder: Every cycle will (on average) consume and produce equal amounts of cells, making for great uranium efficiency. (2 cells burned per cycle, 4 cells rewarded ever 2 cycles)
3) Power efficiency: 2.00 - power output is 40 EU/t, averaging 26 EU/t with cooldown. (Technical efficiency is 4.00, high - like all breeders.)

So, it's a "hybreed" - a mix between a power reactor and a breeder reactor. What I'm thinking about is this: could I make a similar self-replenishing hybreed-design with a higher power output - more uranium cells? This is my best attempt so far at a 3-cell hybreed, and it's falling way short of Mk2 classification:

Mk-IV EA Positive Breeder

That's what I'm pondering; "is there any way to get 2+ power efficiency, 70+ raw power output, and a self-replenishing breeder - all wrapped in one Mk2 reactor?" I'm thinking "probably not without piping ice into it" and since I'm so lazy that I want all this in one reactor; I'm certainly not building a massive external system for a reactor that would be beat easily by having two reactors anyway.

I guess the hybreed reactor is mostly an intellectual excercise, but a good one.

lyplyp

I was toying with the idea of building what *appears* to be a standard Mk2 reactor - but with the added benefit of breeding cells at the same time. I was able to get a 4-chamber reactor to run 2 uranium cells ( for power efficiency 2, and output 40 EU/t ) - while breeding 6 cells to over 50% in one cycle. It'd more than supply its own fissible material. Yay, right? Just one irk - 40EU/t is really quite low, even with the added bonus of free breeding.

So, I've been trying to get a 3-U-cell reactor working... What I'm after is a positive breeder, 2+ power efficiency minimum, that runs like a Mk2 (cold starts, full cycles) while breeding enough to be supplying itself with new cells - and all with a minimum power output of 70 EU/t. I'm of course assuming no RedPower, BuildCraft, no ice/water injectors, etc. I can get it to run 67% of a cycle before boom. Not quite enough. Is such a rector an actual impossibility?

I'm thinking it probably IS impossible.

lyplyp