[0.5.6beta] Fission Reactor and Supercritical Power Generation Tutorial

Foreword

A fission reactor is a very interesting machine; it is both a production machine and a power generation machine.

But when we use it, we must first figure out what kind of machine we want to use it as.

When we use it for production, we want it to run as fast as possible, consume the least material and produce the most output.

When we use it to generate electricity, we want it to run at the right speed, producing more steam with fewer fuel rods, to generate more and longer-lasting electricity.

Upon careful consideration, it is difficult to achieve both of these objectives simultaneously, so it is best to design the breeder reactor with one objective in mind.

Let's start by analyzing the parameters of the fission pile.

Instant coolant output = Consumption x Overclocking Coefficient = (Demand x Coolant Coefficient) x (Supply / Demand), Demand cancels out, resulting in instant coolant output being Coolant Coefficient * Supply. It can be seen that Supply is a value completely determined by the placement of cooling components, while the Coolant Coefficient is fixed.

Thus, the instantaneous coolant output, i.e.the instantaneous steam output, is only related to the arrangement of the cooling components.The arrangement with the maximum supply is known to be the 172-cooling-component checkerboard arrangement.

Total steam output per run = Instantaneous coolant output x Recipe actual duration = Coolant factor x Supply x Recipe duration / Supply x Demand
= Coolant factor x Recipe duration x Recipe heat x Actual parallel x Current temperature / 1500

So the steam output of a single fuel rod = coolant factor x recipe duration x recipe heat generation x current temperature/1500

Therefore, we can find that the total amount of steam produced by a single fuel rod is only related to temperature, and all other values are fixed.

Also, we noticed that the actual runtime duration is the runtime duration of a single fuel rod * the number of fuel rods (because the overclocking coefficient calculation process was divided by the actual parallelism), and the runtime duration of a single fuel rod is only affected by temperature and the arrangement of cooling components. The lower the temperature, the shorter the runtime duration.

Thus, the conclusions are:To quickly produce nuclear waste, the reactor temperature needs to be as low as possible, and the cooling components as numerous as possible; to generate electricity using steam, the steam production rate of the reactor needs to be roughly matched with the consumption rate of the supercritical turbine, with an appropriate number of cooling components and the reactor temperature as high as possible.

So fast breeder reactors can be divided into two types: low-temperature reactors for production and high-temperature reactors for power generation.

Low-temperature reactor (for production)

Based on the calculations above, we can build a fission reactor with 172 cooling components, feeding in sodium-potassium alloy from the beginning, controlling the temperature at298kto achieve maximum speed, and setting the configurable maintenance bay to 0.8x to quickly complete the recipe.

Can choosequadruple MOX fuel rods with the highest nuclear waste outputfor production, orsingle thorium fuel rodsfor production. The latter has a slightly longer recipe time but extremely low heat production, so its actual operating time is about 1/8 of the quadruple MOX fuel rods. The production effect is not much worse than the quadruple MOX.

No turbocharger water is needed, and no explosion-proof measures are required. However, if a steam turbine is already available, it can be used to utilize steam and high-pressure steam for power generation.

Heat exchanger, ME input chest set to input 10k hot sodium-potassium alloy, place infinite water chest, ME output chest, Heat exchanger does not eat configurable maintenance chest, just put an automatic maintenance chest

Reactor, configurable automatic maintenance bay set to 0.8x, input bus set to one quad mox, inventory input bay set to pull sodium-potassium alloy, no need to do shutdown temperature control, it's impossible to explode, about 4s per quad mox, no need to input multiple, two will take 8s three 12s,Inputting multiple actually has the same effect as batch processing

Read fuel rods from the main network, output depleted fuel rods to the main network, subnets only need three disks, disk A marks sodium-potassium alloy, hot sodium-potassium alloy, supercritical sodium-potassium alloy on the component workbench; disk B marks steam and high-pressure steam on the component workbench; disk C is an item disk and does not need to be marked, it is okay if the steam disk is full, the ME output slot of the heat exchanger is infinitely large

Low-temperature pile construction completed here

High-temperature reactor (for power generation)

On the basis of the low-temperature pile, the subnet adds 2 disks, one labeled distilled water and the other labeled supercritical steam.

Heat exchanger ME input bin add marker 1kb supercritical sodium-potassium alloy and 2MB distilled water

Supercritical reactor, significantly reduce the number of cooling components, adjust the configurable maintenance bay to 1.2 times, increase the anti-explosion device

The anti-explosion device is as follows: the threshold transmitter monitors the distilled water level. The machine stops when the distilled water level is less than 200k and restarts when it is greater than 1600k. Below is the ME inventory input bin. The machine control overlay is set to 1 - inverse phase. In the middle is the thermal sensor, set to normal - 1450 - 1500. On the right is the machine control bin, set to enabled - 1 - normal.

Under this condition, the machine will produce supercritical steam at 1456K which maximizes the durability of the fuel rods.

Anything works for fuel rods, because fuel rods don't affect production speed, only durability, and fuel rods are very cheap; if you have to choose one, you can chooseSingle Siliconium Fuel Rod, it's the most durable among all single fuel rods, and it's more profitable than its double and quadruple versions; or you can useQuad Mox Fuel Rodin the front, and it's quite good to produce some nuclear waste on the side

Supercritical steam turbine, ZPM rotor bracket + high-speed mode + auxiliary module + high-speed steel-E rotor state, the production capacity is 1.5A UEV, the steam consumption rate is 2.29KB/s, which is 1.43125b/s of supercritical sodium-potassium vapor production capacity. When the cooling components are not adjacent, the output of each cooling component's supercritical sodium-potassium alloy is fixed at 160mb/s. It can be calculated that 9 cooling components are just enough to meet the demand, and actual verification also shows that the calculation is correct.

Simple algorithm: The number of cooling components needed is the supercritical steam rate consumed by the supercritical steam turbine per second, divided by 1600, and then divided by 160.

However, because the grid will be full, and once it's full the supercritical steam turbine will stop, there will still be a problem of insufficient distilled water for circulation. But the automatic shutdown device for insufficient distilled water has already been introduced above, so it's harmless.

Supercritical steam is worthless, supercritical steam turbineIt is recommended to use high-speed steel-E rotor, and then switch to Ampro rotor

The supercritical power generation capacity of a single unit is as follows

Supercritical power generation can continuously supply energy to the UHV stage with extremely low operating and maintenance costs, and large-scale silicon rock reactors can be directly replaced as the main power generation method in the UHV stage.