Big reactors, how big can they really get?

[jakalth]

How about a 32 x 32 x 10tall reactor?  Probably not the max size you can make and still have it work, but it's pretty close too that.  The reactor has 205 reactor cores clustered in sets of 5, aligned in the effective "+" shape.  The control rods are all set to 80% so I know for sure it can go taller, possibly even another 5 blocks higher.  I call it the; "Far-Too-Big-Unless-You-Intend-To-Power-An-Entire-City" Reactor.

 

It's truely huge...

 

This is it's stats.

 

The reactor has a huge amount of power potential from the 205 reactor cores.  Each core is 8 blocks tall and the whole thing requires over 6,500 yellorium ingots just too fill it.  And it burns through yellowium fast!  An ingot every 20-25 seconds.

 

A simple(yeah... nothing is simple when you build on this scale...) adjustment to the control rods, changing them to 90%, drops it's power output by 45%, but also drops its fuel usage by a sizable 60%.  making it far more efficient, but also far less impressive.

 

Anyone think they have what it takes to try reproducing this massive reactor and increasing it's height too 32x32x15? (it took me 2 hours to increase its height from 7 --> 10)

 

Or better yet!  Build it as is, and convert it to steam generation, then actually try using ALL the steam it would be capable of producing?  If my calculations are correct, by using steam from a reactor this large, you'de be able to produce somewhere in the range of 1.3 -1.4 million RF/tick...  And THAT is a lot of power.

Edited April 25, 2014 by jakalth

[Curunir]

If you did that in Survival, congratulations on the sheer amount of resources used... for science!  ^^

 

Wasn't maximum height 48 blocks? It is probably useless to talk efficiency with that behemoth, but I guess the best way to distribute 205 reactor core blocks would be to go maximum height and only use a comparatively narrow base layout. I have a feeling that Yellorium reactors tend to prefer "stick" layouts, because of the increased spatial density achieved by vertical stacking.

 

Now we just need an application for that much RF/t. And maybe some better Conduits and energy storage, so we don't need to build a forest of 10k RF/t main lines just to get the energy out.

 

The crazy thing is that you can actually transfer all that power (or steam) via a single Tesseract. Which would not solve the problem of handling so much, but only shift it to the output end. But still...

 

If you're bored, how about shaping the columns into a pattern that makes up a radiation warning symbol? That way, anybody flying overhead would certainly know what that building is all about.  :-D

 

P.S.: 205 columns at 8 blocks height is 1640 fuel blocks, which should be 6560 Yellorium ingots (or buckets, as it internally liquifies them) for a fill. Not quite over 9000 yet, but crazy enough.

Edited April 25, 2014 by Curunir

[joshuad156]

Holy crap I can't imagine filling a reactor that size with that coolant.  I hate filling source blocks into all spaces of a large reactor.

 

 

Anyone think they have what it takes to try reproducing this massive reactor and increasing it's height too 32x32x15? (it took me 2 hours to increase its height from 7 --> 10)

 

Time to build a computercraft program to build/expand reactors!  Automate that crap.  =D

[HeatHunter]

Holy crap I can't imagine filling a reactor that size with that coolant.  I hate filling source blocks into all spaces of a large reactor.

 

haven't tried yet, but could a filler do the job for you?

 

Also haven't tried mffs on reactor blocks yet, but if it works, it could be an option to easily add new layers to a reactor...

[joshuad156]

haven't tried yet, but could a filler do the job for you?

 

Also haven't tried mffs on reactor blocks yet, but if it works, it could be an option to easily add new layers to a reactor...

 

Buildcraft has a block called a Flood Gate that would fill an area with a liquid.  I've used these before to fill reactors.  Never tried a filler with fluid though.

 

MFFS is a really good option too.  i've watched some vdis on using it to copy/paste blocks, but never done it myself.  However, I never pass up an opportunity to write Lua to do something useful with my turtles!

[jakalth]

The floodgate sounds like an interesting option if I plan on expanding the reactor.  I've been working on it in creative.  But even in creative, filling that big of an area, 1 source block at a time, is tedious...  And for building up the walls, I've been making use of the extra utilities builders wand.  Makes quick work of repetitive tasks like that.

 

I've tested the tall skinny design as well.  If you look at this picture Here: In the top center of the picture, you can see the tall thin 7x7x32high reactor I tried making.  That thing isn't overly powerful but yeah, it is efficient, relatively.  Have to run the control rods on it at 90% to keep the temp down under control, but otherwise acts the same as the 32x32x10 reactor.  Main difference is, tall thin reactors are easier to build and work with.  The less control rods, the easier it is to adjust the settings on it.  And by easier, I mean far less time consuming.

 

But, overall, I have found little difference between tall skinny and short broad reactor designs.  They both have similar overall efficiencies once adjusted.  The main thing that makes the difference in the design is how much space is available for the internal coolant.  For example, in the picture above, just left of center are 2 similar reactors.  One has 5 + shaped clusters, the other has 5 larger block clusters.  They both have very similar power outputs, but the one with the + shaped clusters has a lot more space between the fuel rods.  It has it's control rods at a lower setting and still runs cooler, hence uses less fuel.  That reactor can be made taller still if i wanted too.  The other design has the control rods all maxed at 90% already and runs a lot hotter, hurting its efficiency, and meaning it can't be made any larger without running the temperature very high.

 

It's interesting stuff here with all the testing.  There does seem to be a fall off point though, in reactor efficiency, once you start making them truly big.

 

:EDIT:

 

So Curunir, a reactor shaped to resemble a radiation warning symbol you say?  How about This: ?

 

outputs 75KiRF/tick, all control rods can be run at 0%, and it has an unusually high radioactivity level 565%.  interesting, no?

Edited April 25, 2014 by jakalth

[HeatHunter]

did some testing and I think the biggest reactor you can build is 32x32x32

 

 

heres the display (air cooled)

 

 

for the simplicity of filling the reactor with coolant I used resonant ender:

 

as you can see, this skyrockets the output ^^

so using a better coolant might still improve this (or a better rod layout)

 

I also tried to actively cool that monster, but this seems to be capped at 50 buckets per tick:

 

no matter how much I drag out of the reactor, the display stays at 50b/t :/

 

(used void waterproof pipes to test, might be the issue but was the same with a fluid void from extra cells...)

 

but interesting thing is that this reactor is online just a few ticks and directly produces 50b/t and the output stays until it cools down to ~150°C

[jakalth]

Hmmm, now that is a true monster reactor HeatHunter.  I knew someone would push it all the way.

 

the 50,000 mb/tick might just be the upper limit to how much steam a reactor can produce.  by the looks of it, i would also say that is probably the limit to how much water it can store as well.  And a reactor can not produce more steam then the capacity of the coolant tank in its GUI.

 

hmmm, 50K mb/tick, that would require at least 7 fluid transfer nodes with full 64 upgrades of both speed and mining just to move that much.  Using tesseracts as a hub to transfer the water into the reactor?

 

:edit: yeah 50,000mb is the hard limit to a reactors coolant tank.  so a reactor can not convert more then the capacity of this tank, per tick, into steam.  no matter how large the reactor....  complicated.....

 

And sadly, even with the most efficient turbine, thats only 583,000RF/tick.  far less then the reactor its self can produce for power.

Edited April 25, 2014 by jakalth

[HeatHunter]

at least it seems somewhat effective if you lower all rods to 100% and only 29 to 90% then it burns an ingot every 2min. and still outputs 50b/t

 

[Curunir]

That rather looks like an exploit. At zero fuel usage, you have free turbine energy with that setup. I guess the formula behind reactor calculations cannot properly resolve the numbers.

[HeatHunter]

na it's not really zero, like I said, it uses an ingot every 2 min.

 

the display jumps to 6,5 for a tick and back to 0 again....

 

Edit:

 

so what to do with all this?

 

with 50B/t i was able to drive 28 turbines at 1770 mB/t (and still have a bit overflow)

thats a total of 588476 RF/t

 

I totally wasted that energy in laser drills so I built up 29 lase drills with 116 prechargers

each taking 5kRF/t so thats 580kRF/t so theres still a bit overflow for the reprocessing...

 

and now I really think about building that in survival

Edited April 26, 2014 by HeatHunter