1.1.8 New player Q's: Setting up a Fission reactor

[Steve From Marketing]

Please re-read threat title. It's fission, not fusion. So please do not spam this thread with comments as to how superior fusion reactor's are, thank you.

Hello all,

Steve here again. I'm having some doubts about setting up my first fission reactor. Also it is very hard to find any useful up-to-date information as most discussions seems to lean towards fusion power.

So far I have managed to set up a working fission reactor and fissile material production. My questions are more about turbine setup/layout.

Take a 5x5 of water and put a fission reactor in the middle of it and it will heat up the 5x5 -1 block of water around it. So I have room for 24 little turbines above the boiling blocks of water. When I examine the reactor it seems to max out at 10,0 Steam per second.

How much steam does it take to power a turbine or how much steam does a turbine consume? How much power does a single little turbine produce? How about the large steam turbine (3x3 small ones, click wrench thing)? How do I measure these metrics?

Steam funnels, I noticed I can use a liquiduct to pipe the steam around. Does it matter how many steam funnels I stack before I connect my liquiduct on the top steam funnel? Do I have to connect the liquiduct to the top one? Does it matter? Afaik steam funnels only stack upways/upwards.

I tested and I noticed I can use a single boiling block of water, steam funnels and liquiducts to power atleast 12 large steam turbines at maximum speed by the look of the blades spinning.

And "Breeder reactors". To my understanding this involes 5 fission reactors where the middle one has a spent fissile rod and the 4 fission reactors around it have breeder rods and these breeder rods "refuel" or "reinrich" (?) the spent fissile rod? Is this correct? Can I use this breeder reactor to also create steam?

Also some of the data in the fission reactor screen. What do they mean:

-toxicity (dm3)

-temperature (It seems to be different than what my thermometers displays)

-steam emission: x,yz/second (Amount of steam the reactor generates per block or total?)

-time left: 1234 seconds 12345 (First is time, second is ?)

[Steve From Marketing]

So far from my little experiments it would seem that 10 large steam turbines generate approximately 270 MJ/t so around 27 MJ/t per large steam turbine.

The reactor Steam per second maxed out around 3,0 this time. I wonder what this figure actually means. Steam funnels can be stacked as high as wanted.

There were some odd things that I noticed. I placed a fresh fissile rod in the reactor. Let it ran out so that the "time left" reached 0 second 50000 then I thought I'll go change it. It just kept going. The fission reactor displayed 2500 seconds 50000 and kept boiling the water. The toxicity number kept rising constantly though. I wonder what it actually means. Steam generation was steady around 3,0 per second. Temperature stayed at the same level the entire time leveling out around 1650 centigrade.

When I hovered over the fissile rod it didn't display the "charge bar for it" or the amount of charge in it. I wonder if this is a bug or there's something about this that eludes me still.

[Steve From Marketing]

Kept using the fissile rod in the reactor and after a while my turbines stopped. So I checked the reactor and the input was empty. Is the fissile rod destroyed if it's used when it's "spent"? Do I have to monitor the reactor closely and grab the fissile rod from it before the charge bar of it is gone? My thermometer was also stuck at 723 centrigade, toxicity reached 24865 dm3 (whatever that means), temperature 0 centigrade and steam 0,5. Maybe the thermometer just somehow bugged out on it's reading.

[jakalth]

Toxicity: only partly implemented. Has to do with how much radiation and waste material(the bad kind) is stored in the reactor.

Temperature: reactor temp is far more accurate. thermometer is quite fiddly and sometimes unreliable.

Steam emission: Not really sure, doesn't take into account how much water your using...

Time left: not really sure what to say about this. supposed to say how long you can run that cell for, but using a control rod changes this dramatically.

5x5 area of water seems to be the most it can consistently heat. If steam funnels are used, it can power 35 Large turbines consistently, sometimes more. I've tested a full rod and gotten a total output of 26,000,000 Mj, or was it 36,000,000... didn't really write that down... Anyways, this was using the steam funnel method. You get a LOT more steam, per funnel, from a fission reactor. It also runs a lot longer per cell. Like fusion, fission reactors use up the cell when it runs out, so a way to remove the cells before this happens is good when your using a breeder setup.

Keep your reactor from getting too hot. doesn't seem to be as big of an issue with a 5x5 area of water around it, but the control rod is still a good idea. The hotter the reactor, the more steam it produces. But, if your reactor gets above 1800, you start running the risk of it failing. If it reaches 2000, it will instantly explode.

Yeah, steam funnels do not have a limit to how many you can stack on top of each other. They also loose no steam when stacked. But, they can only move steam strait up.

If you want to see how much power each turbine is putting out, you'll need a multimeter. Run a power conduit from the turbine to a storage device(redstone energy cell, makeshift battery, or a machine). Right click on the spot where the conduit connects to the storage device and it will say how much power is being inserted into the device. This is how much power the turbine is outputting. 1 large turbine "Should" output more then 9 small turbines. The large turbine is at least far easier to work with.

So, compared to Fusion here is the resaults:

1. Power output: Both seem to output about the same power per tick using steam funnels. But fission reactors win on total output of a single reactor.
   
2. Build cost: Fission reactor is far cheaper to setup(even if you count the difference in turbines)
   
3. Operating cost: Fusion is cheaper to operate. Easier to find and refine water then uraninite. But it goes through cells far faster.
   

Which is truly better?? Both. It is all down to preference at this point.

[Steve From Marketing]

I did a bit more testing and I might have miscalculated the power output. My power storage consists of 12 REC's set up like below (C is cell, + is conduit):

+C+C+

+C+C+

+C+C+

+C+C+

+C +C+

+C+C+

+_+_+

+++++

So each cell has two power inputs (So each cell can recharge max 200 MJ/T as it's 100 MJ/t per connection). I first thought that the middle conduit lanes would count as two when examining with a multimeter but it would seem that the multimeter doesn't count per connection but the total of it. Now I have 15 large steam turbines and the connections on the sides displayed average 16,874979 MJ/t an d the middle conduits showed the same figure. So calculating this is 18 conduits times 16,874979 MJ/t totals up to 303,749622 MJ/t. This divided by the amount of turbines is 303,749622 MJ/T / 15 large steam turbines is 20,2499748 MJ/t per large steam turbine.

Also I noticed that the fission reactor "seems" a bit buggy. I had a cell that had according to the UI over 800 seconds remaining and maybe a minute or so later it was displaying the same 2500 / 50000 readings as before in my spent fissile rod that was used up. The UI sometimes also bugs out in atleast in the temperature reading. When I opened it up once the temperature reading started going up and up. After it reached around 2700 centigrade, I closed the fission reactor UI and checked the Thermometer module reading and it was happily hovering around 1600 - 1650 centigrade.

Based on these fission can be useful but from what I've read it's really a lot crappier than fusion. The abovementioned fissile rod weirdness is one big let down because basically I lost 25% runtime/power generation on that rod. Also it REALLY sucks that the "spent" fissile rods look EXACTLY like a fresh one. Same item ID, no charge bar or indicator where the player would know it's nearly spent. You can workaround this by storing these in a different labeled chest I guess but it's a workaround none the less.

Also taking total advantage of the steam generated would required enormous amounts of resources for the turbines (copper mainly is the problem atleast for me). It would be nice if there would be additional turbine types or you could combine the large steam turbines into something even bigger single unit.

Also my large steam turbines seem to (atleast) visually bug out. On few of them the corner pieces show up as small steam turbines but it has the large steam turbine look and seems to work as a large steam turbine. This is remedied by click it with a wrench turning it to 9 small steam turbines and then clicking again to make it a large steam turbine. This is tedious but it only looks like a visual bug but cannot confirm this 100%. Would be more advantegous if there would be reciped for creating large steam turbines in a workbench/assembly table/whatever block. Recipe for large steam turbine requiring 9 small steam turbines and you could convert large back to 9 small steam turbines. Also would be useful if you could combine say Y amount of large steam turbines to something even "bigger". I don't know how it's currently implement in the coding side but I would be pretty sure that a small X-large steam turbine (Or something like this) would be less stressful than dozens and dozens of large steam turbines or hundreds of small steam turbines.

Next on my list is trying a breeder reactor setup and see can I charge the fissile rods and is it IMO worth it or should fission reactors really just be skipped and go straight for fusion.

[Steve From Marketing]

Did another test with another fissile rod that had around 1500 seconds remaining according to UI and the item charge bar was approx in the middle. Around 700-850 seconds that the fission reactor UI showed it turned into another "nearly spent" fissile rod.