Tutorial / Safe, Easy, & Powerful Nuclear Reactor

Note: I completely reworked the design to include Redpower2 parts now. It's far simpler and works perfectly in Multiplayer. I'm sorry for everyone's blown up stuff.



So you want to make a Nuclear Reactor, but you looked at the page for the Nuclear Reactor and understood slightly less than you did from your calculus book.

Never fear: Here is a tutorial explaining how to build a dead simple, powerful, completely safe, and automated Nuclear Reactor.

Some notes first:

1: You must follow these instructions precisely. Pay particularly close attention to the section "We make it safe." Even a small change could result in the reactor exploding. You will be told if something is safe to change and what would be catastrophic to change, as well as why it would be catastrophic.

2: You can not skip sections as you're reading; make sure to read the entire article. Nearly every single case of this setup "failing" has been because the player skipped, ignored, misread, or otherwise did a section wrong. There are tips throughout the entire article that can mean the difference between more power than you know what to do with and a crater where your house used to be. If you change anything, we are not responsible for your crater.

3: If you complete this Reactor Setup, you will have 2030 EU/t at your disposal; slightly less than 4 HV Solar Arrays. While it is not necessary to use all of the power, it is recommended to get a Mass Fabricator and send the excess power to that.

4: Don't be afraid of the size of this article: The actual design is very simple.

5. One last thing: This is a tutorial on how to build this particular setup, not how to craft any components or what any functions of the reactor do. If you want information like that, click on the links in the Materials section below, or go to the Nuclear Reactor page.

Materials
First things first: What will you need to complete this setup? Note: this is a list of the components, not of the raw materials. And finally
 * 6 Reactor Chambers
 * 1 Nuclear Reactor
 * 3 Redstone Dust
 * 1 Redstone Repeater
 * 1 Filter
 * 1 Timer
 * 2 Pneumatic Tubes (Minimum)
 * 1 Screwdriver
 * 1 Energy Condenser
 * 2 Mk1 Energy Collectors (one Mk2 is more expensive)
 * 1 Lever
 * 1 Ice (Put snowballs in a Compressor)
 * 1 Thermal Monitor
 * 47 Uranium Cells

The Easy Bit
The first thing you need are your two Energy Collectors and the Energy Condenser. One Mk2 Collector will also work, but it costs 8 more diamonds and 1 more glowstone. Place them wherever you want; they don't actually need to be right by the reactor, I just have them this close for the purpose of screenshots. You do, however, need at least the equivalent of two Mk1 Collectors; just one won't put out enough Ice.



Go ahead and place one Ice Block (created by Compressing a Snowball) in the top left box of the Condenser, so it will go ahead and start making ice.

Place your Filter directly next to your Condenser, and right click it with your Screwdriver until the large hole is facing the Condenser and the small hole is facing away (don't forget, the filter needs a redstone pulse, so use a timer!). Place however many Pneumatic Tubes you need to get from the Filter to where you want the Nuclear Reactor. Note: You can place a relay anywhere along the line to hold excess Ice, but it's not really necessary, unless you really don't like the Ice bouncing back and forth in the pipes. Seeing the Ice in the pipes can reassure you that everything is working and you have plenty of ice going into the reactor.

This can help you to know how much ice per second is needed, depending on the design.

Now Things Will Look Nuclear
You can't place Reactor Chambers without connecting them to a Nuclear Reactor, and you don't want to sink the Reactor into the ground (you'll see in the next section), so place any random block on the ground where you want the Reactor to be centered. Place your Nuclear Reactor on the block and break the block so your Reactor is floating one block off the ground.

If you right click the Reactor, you'll notice the GUI is awfully small. That's what the Reactor Chambers are for: Surround the Reactor on all six sides with the Chambers, and right click a Chamber. Now, you'll see that it is quite large - comparable to a double chest. The Chambers allow it to get to higher temperatures without blowing up as well as slightly increasing the cooling effects... Well, and obviously allowing you to place more uranium in the machine. More uranium = more power!... Note, do NOT put uranium in the reactor yet.

Are you getting nervous? Don't be, because now...

IMPORTANT:
If you skip this step,  Your reactor will likely blow up . You must place the thermal monitor and the redstone in order to make this setup safe. The lever helps, but it is not completely vital.

Hold shift to place your Thermal Monitor directly on the Reactor, and place the Redstone Dust and Redstone Repeated exactly as shown in the picture to the top right. The thermal monitor's GUI, seen to the bottom right, allows you to set whatever temperature you want. When the Reactor raises above the temperature you select, the monitor will put out a redstone signal. If you apply a redstone signal to the Reactor, it will immediately shut off all uranium cells while allowing all cooling effects to still take place.



However, the monitor will not put the signal directly into the reactor just by placing it there, so that little bit of redstone is required. This makes the reactor completely and totally safe, even if the cooling system fails, because the monitor will never let the reactor get above ~500 units of heat. A Reactor with six chambers like this won't actually explode until 16000 units, but you should never let it get that high. At extremely high temperatures, the reactor can ignite nearby flammable blocks, cause radiation damage to players, and even melt some of the chambers!

Place your lever directly on the reactor, on the face of the chamber above the redstone repeater, as shown in the picture to the right, and turn the lever on. You can actually place this lever anywhere on the reactor, I just like placing it there because it lights up the redstone and makes it obvious whether the lever is on or off, as seen in the picture. Supplying the reactor with redstone (via the lever or the thermal monitor) shuts off the uranium cells, so the reactor stops generating heat and power.

Starting the Machine


We're almost done - now it's time to get everything going. Take your 47 Uranium Cells and 7 stacks of ice from the Energy Condenser and place them inside the Reactor in the pattern shown to the right (or any design that uses ice). The two Uranium Cells in the bottom can be anywhere on the bottom row, but they must be separated. If they are next to each other, the Reactor will generate 2050 EU/t, which is too much even for HV cable (it can only take up to 2048 EU/t).

Note: The Uranium will not have the green bar at the bottom until you turn it on.



Also: So long as your lever is on, the Uranium will not do anything. No power or heat will be generated yet. If your lever is not on, but you have placed the Thermal Monitor as instructed, you are also still safe. Without either, however, your reactor will blow up in less than ten seconds.

Take your Timer and place it next to the Filter as seen to the right. It can really be set to any time you like, but I put it on 8 seconds, as that's how long it takes two Mk1 Collectors to make a full stack of Ice. The timer will start the Filter pumping Ice, and now, we're pretty much set!

All you have to do now, is flip the lever and turn the Reactor on. If you've done something wrong, the Thermal Monitor will shut it off before anything happens. If you've done something very wrong, and it's still building up heat, you'll start to see little black smoke particles. This can occasionally happen at very low temperatures, so watch it for a minute or so. If you see little flames coming out of the top of the Chambers, immediately flip the lever to switch the reactor off, and recheck everything.

What to Do with All This Power?
Presumably, until now, all you've used were some Solar arrays, maybe a Geothermal Generator, or maybe even

a really clever Water Mill setup. But now you're dealing with extreme voltage, which is anything above high voltage (512 EU/t). The only thing that can stand up to this beast is HV cable. I would recommend just one HV cable block and immediately sending it into a HV transformer. HV Cable loses power very quickly, so this way you can use Glass Fibre asap and stop losing your power. As mentioned above, now would be a good time to invest in a Mass Fabricator. This much power will raise the percentage in a Mass Fabricator by almost 4 points each second. That's roughly 25 seconds per UU-Matter, and roughly 16 minutes for a stack of it.

The Teleporter and the Terraformer also use enormous amounts of EU, or you can hook an Energy Link to the Reactor and send all the power to a dozen Quarrys and a couple Refineries all at once.

The power is in your hands now. Have fun.

Video tutorial
Confused? Learn better from actually seeing it built? Check out this youtube tutorial.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy2j3H6SdqE