Posts by ShneekeyTheLost

  • Experimental Changes to Nuclear Engineering

    Quote from Fallen_dead

    As long as your system is properly primed then how "Tight" your automation is wouldn't matter. When I used cooling reactor set ups I always felt safer being able to run at least a quarter cycle without any cooling.


    I don't understand what you are trying to say here.


    If you don't have a tight automation, then you might get enough extra heat to blow up your reactor. It doesn't really matter how many iterations it has to go through, when you're talking several thousand heat per second, it only takes one tic to turn your reactor into a crater.


    I was thinking about something like this setup with MOX fuel. You can get that bad boy up to around 18k heat before anything bad happens. So you're going to be looking at INT((18,000/22,100)*4 + 1) = 4, which is the maximum multiplier possible. In fact, you could drop it down to 17,000 heat, still have the maximum multiplier, and have 1k heat as a buffer before anything bad happens.


    In such a setup, it would be producing 1600 EU/t, but would have a micro-cycle time of only around 160 seconds (assuming heat is also quadrupled).

  • Experimental Changes to Nuclear Engineering

    Actually, a CRCS style reactor would work phenomonally well with MOX fuel, as the actual temperature of the hull never changes during use. Obviously, if you had enough cells to be able to go a full cycle, it would be a lot easier to automate.


    In effect, you use 60k cooling cells adjacent to the MOX fuel. You wait until temperature reaches your ideal number (using a thermal monitor from Nuclear Control), then add in your coolant cells. Badda-bing, badda-boom, you've got power streaming out of your ears.


    Of course, your automation system would have to be pretty tight to avoid explosions...

  • Experimental Changes to Nuclear Engineering

    Quote from Shakie666

    Omicron, I'm not on 1.6 yet so i'm not 100% on how MOX fuel works, but couldn't you just leave out 1 heat vent or something, until the reactor gets nice and hot, they put it back in? Trouble is then you'd need a cooling setup that EXACTLY matches the heat output of the fuel.


    By the way; in the face of craftable quantum generators (aka compact solars) is 8 depleted cells per uranium really that crazy?


    The problem with that is a) you're going to get environmental consequences (like being lit on fire) if it is hot enough to get the maximum multiplier of EU which you will then have to deal with, and b) nearly impossible to automate this.

  • [Official] New Reactors design thread.


    Well, you can always try this one:


    Vest Pocket Reactor
    Chambers: 1
    EU/t: 180
    Efficiency: 3.0


    It's the reactor design I've been using in my Tower of Power builds these days (see Tower of Power thread for details). At only a single chamber, this baby is quite compact, and at 180 EU/t, beats the reactor design you are using for the same efficiency. It does have some running costs unfortunately, due to the dual-uranium cells.


    If you don't mind a lower output, you can use this build/


    Chambers: 1
    EU/t: 120
    Efficiency: 3.0.


    No running costs due to using only regular uranium cells rather than doubles, but at a noticeable output drop. Still has the same efficiency rating, and a higher effective efficiency rating if you plan on using UUM to offset the copper involved in the dual cells from the previous design.

  • RTG

    RTG's are passive energy generation, true, but they suffer from economical imbalance. Currently, Water Mills are far cheaper to set up properly to produce the same EU output. Granted, they have a bigger footprint, but that footprint can be put nearly anywhere. So you can just bury it under your base or whatever. Solar flowers also kick it to the curb pretty seriously. Wind towers, properly managed, completely outclass them.


    The problem with RTG is that by the time you get to the point where you can make and fuel one, you've already GOT all of the other passive options, which are all cheaper.


    RTG Fuel requires plutonium, which means you need to have already gotten a nuclear reactor up and running to generate the depleted cells to process into plutonium. By that time, 16 EU/t isn't going to be very impressive, and it will require multiple cycles.


    The best design I've come up with to chew through cells is this design which chews through 36 cells per cycle and generates 360 EU/t. Granted, efficiency sucks, but that's kind of the point in a reactor design like this.

  • Experimental Changes to Nuclear Engineering

    Quote from TuxedoSteve

    You can also use the plutonium for pellets of RTG fuel, which is a max of 5 per RTG, with the EU/t output being 1 fuel=1EU/t, 2 fuel=2EU/t, 3 fuel=4EU/t, 4 fuel=8EU/t, 5 Fuel=16EU/t.


    If it wasn't so vastly cheaper and easier for me to make a simple water tower producing 16 EU/t than all the nonsense involved in making a fully loaded RTG generator, it might even be relevant.


    And we're talking passive water tower, which produces 16 EU/t. Not any of those automated ones.


    Don't get me started on solar flowers...

  • Experimental Changes to Nuclear Engineering

    Quote from TuxedoSteve

    I would like people to note that although the upfront cost for fuel is not cheap uranium-wise it is much cheaper when you thermal centrifuge the depleted uranium, it is 6 U238, and 3 small piles of U235 for one enriched uranium fuel, but when you centrifuge the depleted uranium you get 4 U238 back, so the actual cost is less than 1 uranium ore.


    Umm... look at your math again:


    OLD system: 1 Depleted Cell = 1 Re-enriched cell (with breeder) = 1 Uranium Cell
    NEW system: 1 Depleted Cell = about 2/3 of the U238 and none of the U235 you need to make a uranium cell.


    So again, it is more expensive than it used to be.

  • Experimental Changes to Nuclear Engineering

    Another 'stealth nerf' to this system is that it now requires copious quantities of EU to be able to set up, which actually reduces overall efficiency.


    Before, it didn't take any energy to produce nuclear material, now it requires several machines, some of which are real energy hogs.


    Canning machines have been around since IC1, they aren't new. The overhaul they just got kinda made me facepalm. Fridge Logic forces me to question the healthiness of any food coming out of the canning machine after it has produced uranium rods, but then Minecraft in general doesn't work very well with Fridge Logic.

  • [Official] New Reactors design thread.

    Quote from Speleomantes

    Looks like that's the basis of it. I can see why you'd value your lapis so much. If you don't mind me asking, what do you do with >7200 EU/tick?!? Build a fortress out of solid Iridium block?!? Shiny! :D


    It just kinda... happens. You know how it is... you mine out everything in a 2k block radius of each of your bases, and want to build some kind of mega-project in the holes... like say a monolithic fortress or something... and you find yourself wanting a whole bunch of power suddenly.


    Honestly, I don't bother with Breeders, or nuclear in general, until I have that kind of demand. Lower level power generation is much more easily obtained through Geothermals or just regular Generators running on charcoal. It isn't until your power requirements are at that level that nuclear really becomes worth the 'entry fees', in my opinion.


    CRCS was designed as the effective replacement for CASUC, only replacing the cooling cells and cooling them down periodically rather than just expending them.

  • [Official] New Reactors design thread.

    Quote from Speleomantes

    So to run just this one relatively modest breeder I'm going to have to build 6 reactors, one functional and five for cooling. If I built some monster that produces massive amounts of heat, and I'd have to to burn through all the U cells that I'll be producing, I'd need dozens of inert cooling reactors and all the attendant infrastructure to move coolant cells around. That's my central criticism of CRCS. Yes it works, yes, it saves resources in the long run, but it comes with a massive up-front price tag in the vast amounts of infrastructure that you have to build. It's a one-time cost but it's a huge bill.

    That's the price you pay for 7,200 EU/t to 32,000 EU/t.


    Quote

    Let's look at the basic math. Lapis is a finite resource, if I run out of world to mine. Uranium is also a finite resource. I *absolutely* have to mine Uranium. I can stretch it out using breeder reactors but I can't make it from UU-matter. My reactor cooks 870 DI cells into U cells so I have to mine 109 U to supply a single cycle. Using a miner with an OV card I get about 2 U from a 9 by 9 square plot so I'll need 55 of these to get enough U to feed the breeder. That works out to just over 17 chunks. According to the official Minecraft Wiki, lapis ore occurs at an average rate of 3.43/chunk, so while mining for the Uranium I'll come across about 60 lapis ore blocks. Each will yield an average of 6 lapis shards.


    In mining the Uranium to feed the breeder I will also mine some 360 lapis shards and after deducting 235 lapis for LZH charging my stockpile will increase by about two stacks per reactor cycle.


    Lapis is a finite resource but so is Uranium and Uranium is less abundant. Uranium is the limiting resource in the equation so long after I have spent the last of my Uranium I will have left-over lapis.

    We have a basic, fundamental difference of play style here. I find myself using a crapton of Lapis on Lapotron Crystals for MFSU's. After all, with 7,200 EU/t, and each MFSU outputting a mere 512 EU/t, you'll need just over 14 MFSU's running in serial to keep the EU flow from choking.

  • Experimental Changes to Nuclear Engineering

    Right, so there's been some rather... fundamental changes with nuclear engineering in the experimental fork. Of course, being experimental, there's no guarantee that this fork will ever actually be incorporated into the main IC2 development. The other caveat, of course, is that it is still a work in progress, so nothing is set in stone.


    With that said...


    First off, the amount of nuclear material produced per uranium ore is dramatically increased. Then it requires a bunch more nuclear material to produce the stuff that goes into the reactors. On the whole, it is a slight nerf, but somewhat mitigated by the fact that every fuel rod drops a depleted cell, so breeders just got a whole lot more useful. At the same time, however, heating cells got removed, which is a pretty stiff nerf-bat swung at breeders in general.


    Now, fuel rods are currently made in the Canning Machine, and it takes for bloody ever... worse, it can't accept overclocker upgrades. Which means to make enough nuclear material to run a typical reactor, it's going to take for bloody ever. Oh, and because Canning Machines can't accept upgrades, that means no auto-eject upgrades either, which means automation of the task is going to be a PITA.


    Heat and EU numbers haven't changed... which means all the old reactor designs should work just fine. Of course, with the additional nonsense involved in setting it up, this can only be seen as pushing Nuclear Power into an even less viable option for power generation... unless you use the MOX generators, which means having already run nuclear generators to get the depleted cells to generate the plutonium to make the fuel pellets for the passive EU income.


    It's at least different and interesting. Lot of potential here, let's see if it pans out as well as I hope it will...

  • [Official] New Reactors design thread.

    Lets look at some micro-cycle times:


    120 seconds is the micro-cycle time for your breeder reactor. Then we bring up this cooling reactor, which has a micro-cycle time of 500 seconds even. Pushing that to 125 so it is an even 4 reactors is NOT safe, unfortunately, so you'll need 5 cooling reactors for this setup.


    If you double-check the last page of the DDoS reactor thread, you can see a doubled 5 chamber reactor which can handle this in two reactors for an overall savings in materials expended.


    As far as what you can do with 8700 U cells? Well, I answered that question right here and most especially here.


    It is basic math. Lapis is a finite resource. Eventually, it will run out. You can't NOT run out if it runs long enough. Finite resource expenditure is ALWAYS better than negative resource flow.


    Lapis is used in bulk when trying to make MFSU's, which is going to be necessary when dealing with the quantities of power that you start working with when playing with Nuclear. 10+ MFSU's is not an unusual number to set up in serial to be able to avoid choking your EU flow. MFSU's require Lapotron Crystals. LOTS of them. Trust me, if you start actually building the infrastructure you're going to need to support this, you're going to be spending through quite a bit of your lapis.


    Tinkers Construct is a stand-alone mod which focuses on more 'low tech' tools. It has a different method of enchantment which consumes copious quantities of resources in order to put enchantments on the tools. However, it doesn't play nice with GregTech, the mod authors got into a pissing match, and installing one pretty much guarantees you won't be able to install the other.

  • [Official] New Reactors design thread.

    Quote from Speleomantes

    Congrats. What's CRCS? No, seriously. Like I said, I'm a noob.


    Okay, you might want to check out this thread for the blind stumbling around to get to CRCS, with this being a much better explaination of the theory and design, even if it is still written back in the day when RP2 was pretty much the best way of moving things around.


    Quote

    See, there's the fundamental difference in perspective that's causing this. You're measuring the efficiency of this design based on the energy cost of the UU-matter needed to replace the lapis that the LZH condensators burn through. From that view-point you are entirely correct. That reactor design would consume a hideous amount of energy to keep running.


    I on the other hand have no intention whatsoever of wasting valuable UU-matter to make lapis. I understand that UU-matter is a convenient, if somewhat flawed, conversion for various forms of matter/energy but why would I actually exchange the one for the other? I am in the position of having little use for lapis and great gobs of the stuff taking up space in my storage. If I use LZH condensators then I can effectively convert lapis that is little more than mine waste into large volumes of reactor cells. At the end of the day I still have great gobs of lapis, marginally more storage space and a whole lot more reactor fuel. Can you point out the downside to me? I'm having a hard time seeing it.

    You aren't going to be able to pull up that much Lapis constantly. I flat guarantee it. Sooner or later, you will run out. And when you do, you'll be running on UUM for your Lapis needs. Furthermore, Lapis is by no means 'mine waste' if you ever bother with anything in IC2. Doubly so if you use Tinkers Construct (which you probably don't, since you use GregTech).


    Quote

    That's precisely what I'm doing. 75 Uranium input, 470 uranium cells output at the cost of 235 lapis burnt and gone forever. That may not be terribly efficient use of lapis but I don't care about it and would have to have my head checked if I stared converting Uranium to energy to UU-matter and then to lapis. Hell, I'd probably need my head amputated for reasoning that defective.

    Efficient in your uranium USAGE does not mean maximum uranium output, it means most economical use of your uranium. And once your Lapis runs out... and it will... you'll be so far behind on your power budget that you'll never recover.



    Quote

    I considered that method but you need some means of cooling the cells back down again. That more or less requires a dummy reactor, heat vents, etc. All expensive components to build. Granted, it's a one-time cost but given the relative rates of heating in the reactor (480 heat/s/cell in my design) and cooling in the dummies (can you cool faster than 16 heat/s/cell with efficient use of space?) that's a 30:1 ratio. Assuming you can use half the space in a dummy for cooling cells back down, the total tally comes out to two full blown 6-chamber reactors, one smaller single-block reactor (damn those extra six cells!), 60 or so component heat vents and 64 coolant cells in order to maintain thermal equilibrium for a full cycle. It might be worse given poor cooling efficiency around the margins of the dummy reactors. Let me know if there's a better way to chill the coolant back down.

    Check that second thread I mentioned. There's a simple one-chamber coolant reactor which has a very good cooling micro-cycle.


    Quote

    You could reduce that by storing heated coolant cells for later cooling but you can't run your reactor while you do. In terms of time you'd probably save less that way than by simply using a Mark III (or higher) with inactive periods to allow the reactor to cool itself and you'd certainly spend a whole lot more resources so it's a non-starter. The only way that would make sense is if you had short-term demand for large quantities of Uranium followed by longer hiatuses but I don't see that as being terribly likely.

    No, I'm suggesting using AE network to literally decentralize the cooling of cells to multiple simultaneous cooling reactors.


    Quote

    At the end of the day I decided that I'd rather burn the lapis than build a whole lot more equipment. The latter is a more sustainable choice given that lapis is theoretically non-renewable but given my existing stockpile of the stuff, its lack of significant alternative uses and the rate at which I'll find more I'll probably run out of Uranium to make into DI cells first.

    You're going to go through that stockpile a LOT faster than you think you will.


    You seem to think that your Lapis will never run out. I know better.

  • [Official] New Reactors design thread.

    Quote from Speleomantes

    Hi Shneekey,


    That depends entirely on how you're making your comparison. If I wanted a simple set-it-and-forget-it breeder with great efficiency for cells charged/U burnt then your design wins hands down. If I wanted a reactor that charges cells fast, albeit at a reduced charge/U efficiency, then my first design wins by more than an order of magnitude. My design also outputs significantly more EU/tick and has better generating efficiency but those aren't really factors that I'm interested in since my objective is a fast breeder.


    Please also take into consideration that the complication is not necessarily needless. If you want a dead simple design then yes, it's worse than needless, it's a waste of resources. If I want to solve an interesting and challenging problem like swapping out multiple reactor components including coolant without thermal rise that would make my shiny high-T reactor into a low-elevation glass bowl :cursing: then the complexity is rather the point of the exercise. It's simple enough to go to the Reactor Planner, plunk in fuel and isotope cells, divide the heat by five and add that many reactor heat vents. Here is a design that's based off the one that you posted but using Th in place of U, using 12 fewer heat vents and getting much better efficiency. It also runs five times longer. It took me all of about as long to design it as you did with yours but was a pretty joyless exercise in remedial math MinecraftZombie. It's great if you want dead simple but really, where's the fun in that ? :D


    I think you miss the meaning of my post completely.


    Do recall whom you are talking to. I invented CRCS reactor design, which is heavily based on the transfer of components, including nuclear and coolant material. I can appreciate the complexity involved, I followed how, where, and why you did what you did. However none of that makes LHZ's any less horrible under any situation, PARTICULARLY the one you've tried to apply it to.


    First off, it's not going to break even on power, even WITH a couple of quad cells. Not with the amount of Lapis you'll be chewing through, needing to be replaced with UUM, which requires EU to create. Hell, you're talking GregTech here... you know, some ten to hundred TIMES the EU cost of 'core' IC2... you're ridiculously energy inefficient. You'd have to build another battery of reactors just to keep it supplied! This DEFEATS the purpose of a breeder... to be efficient in your use of uranium.


    The breeder I cobbled together in less than a minute was a sarcastic example thrown in your face to demonstrate just how ludicrous the design is. The one advantage the breeder I linked (fully admitting it's probably one of the worst designs ever submitted on these forums... which is saying quite a bit) is that it at least doesn't cost energy to maintain. Yours does.


    You claim it generates more EU, but it costs you more than you generate in keeping those blasted LHZ's filled. If you were to use those same item-transferring methods with cooling cells and swapping them out, you'd obviate and negate a large chunk of my problem. In fact, it's how I got started on the CRCS design to begin with... I saw the huge trap that LHZ's presented, and I sought a more efficient solution. Same principle would apply in your case.


    Also, Thorium stinks as a breeding material these days, don't trust everything the planner says, particularly not when it comes to GT components. The formulae have changed significantly since the planner was last updated.

  • CRCS Powerplant

    Quote from MinecraftRedstoner


    OK, GregTech Computer said 526 sec on the plutonium setup. I need
    8/2*(3000sec/526sec)=22,8(23) Cooling Towers. For a Matter Fab I need 4 reactors so I would need 92 cooling Towers. Last question: The 4 reactors would have 32 cooling cells. So I could only fill 16 of the cooling Towers. Do I need now more sets of Helium cooling cells, or how should I fill the other ones?


    As far as your numbers go, they look right to me. You need 96 cooling towers for your 4 reactors.


    Yes, you need more sets of Helium cooling cells. You'll want enough cooling cells to fill each and every one of your cooling towers. Because at some point, if you run this long enough, each and every one of your cooling towers will have a cooling cell cooling down in it.

  • CRCS Powerplant

    Quote from MinecraftRedstoner


    I don't Understand that:
    number of cooling cells / 2 *(Micro-Cycle/Cooling Cycle)
    = 8/2 *(660sec/3000sec)
    =0,88 cooling towers? ?(


    660 sec come from the generation time of 11 minutes, that the reactor planner says, when I use Plutonium.


    sorry, got those numbers reversed. For these, it should be 8/2*(3000/660) = 18.1 (round up to 19) cooling towers. However, you have a MAJOR problem, sir. That reactor planner IS NOT ACCURATE. Do not trust anything it says when you start using GregTech, particularly not when you start using plutonium. The numbers have changed significantly since the last time the planner was updated. Use a Gtech computer to simulate a reactor for a more accurate set of numbers.

  • CRCS Powerplant

    Quote from MatLaPatate

    Just sayin: "Freezer" = Vacuum Freezer from GT. Consume EU to cool cell down ^^.


    Now that sounds like interesting times, although it runs into much the same problem that the Condensators do of destroying your efficiency rating by sucking up large quantities of EU. How much EU/t does the Vacuum Freezer consume?