Pretty much impossible, it’s that hard. I would need to take control over every single pipe containing radioactive waste and disable all interconnections with not only other Mods but also the aforementioned Garbage Bin, not to mention I need to make all Pipes indestructible as soon as Radioactive Waste enters them.
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What if you make it so only special pipes/containers (made of lead and concrete, or something like that) can contain the radioactive waste, and make it so the actual item/fluid never exists in world outside of them?
Then you’d only need to make those pipes/containers indestructable
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It doesn’t need to be a liquid per say. Perhaps the reactor becomes ‘contaminated’ much like how a boiler gets calcified and requires a cleaning tool, that tool would then need to be probably treated, and the cleaning process would be cheaper than disposing of it and building a new one?
Or a container that fills via percentage over time, again cleaning the container designed to be cheaper than disposing of the container and building a new one?
If you can’t stop someone voiding the waste, you need to provide an incentive to discourage the behavior.
EDIT
Perhaps, and I’m just saying this without considering the sizable coding it might take, but you could work in a process similar to how swamp water takes over normal water. That the reactor needs to be connected to a river or ocean and would contaminate the river/ocean over time. I say river rather than a water source as you seem to have methods in place to check if it is a river/ocean or not.
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Only problem is, only the oldest designs irl use water
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Good point, but aside from the river idea the other methods could work, you just need to make sure the construction of the container and container cleaner is more cost efficient than rebuilding the container by a high margin.
It’s like a wrench, sure I could make a new one but it’s more cost efficient and somewhat easier to use a few plates.
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The fuck what? The only reasons Nuclear Power Plants are at Rivers is because they need lots of Water that gets evaporated in the Cooling Towers. There is no Pollution dumping into Rivers, what kinda Environmental Monsters are you? XD
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a-hahaha, you wanted a way to not void pollution.
you either need an incentive not to void -or- a way to put that pollution in a place people can’t easily void.
moral quandaries? What’s that?
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99% of commercial reactors irl are Gen2 designs from the 70s and 80s. Basically slightly more advanced LWR (light water reactors). That’s why they use water, not to mention the water used to run the turbines. The remaining 1% are Gen3 reactors from the 90s and early 2000s, but they’re mostly experimental proof-of-concept reactors. Nobody wants to be the first to build a full scale reactor that has never been used commercially before, not to mention the bad reputation nuclear has.
Gen4 reactors are still in development, the goal is to start building them in the 2020s. The only problem is that out of 6 designs, only one can be made with currently known materials
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I am more concerned about the extent of nuclear pollution caused by a nuclear reactor explosion and how to protect it, like Chernobyl.
Throwing nuclear waste into another dimension is indeed a “lazy” solution to nuclear pollution, which does not complicate the code, and why can’t nuclear waste be thrown into the ender garbage bin?
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Newer designs are made so that it’s impossible for them to explode. They have passive built-in security systems, so that if the core becomes too hot, it physically can’t continue the chain reaction.
But yeah, in GT old/cheap reactors should definetely explode and cause long term damage to the world
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When I think of long term damage to the world i’m reminded of Thaumcraft’s tainted biomes.
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Because that would be way too easy, that’s why. And if I made a downside like “all Ender Garbage Bins now emit Radiation of contained Stuff” then you can end up radiating other peoples Bases since all Ender Garbage Bins are connected.
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While we figure out a way to avoid cheaty disposal of nuclear waste, what do you think about the fast reactors? They don’t produce waste (only fission products which are technicaly safe) and are end-game stuff, which GT6 could use more of
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I still think aside from poisoning the world with deadly water the best method would be to treat radiation as an aspect of the reactor that needs to be managed rather than an object to be removed.
Similar to calcification but which causes radiation damage in a radius around reactor parts similar to how bees operate when you are near their hives. The greater the radiation build up in a reactor the stronger and larger that radius becomes.
Therefore a managed reactor is safe while as a poorly maintained or abandoned reactor becomes deadly.
MINI EDIT
(At this point the hazmat suit would be a must for shutting down / repairing the reactor.)
EDIT
Theoretically at this point it could spew contaminated waste or water which could be stored and cleaned or voided, but would not resolve the underlying problem of the unmaintained reactor.
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I have also been thinking about implementation of nuclear reactors in GT6 recently (thanks Chernobyl!) and have done some research. A simplification and gamification of nuclear engineering is not easy, as nuclear reactors are quite complex and there are many different designs. Nuclear reactors can’t just be single blocks someone plops down in the world, they need to be optimization puzzles imo.
The things around reactors, like processing nuclear fuel are obviously easier to design, but there is something that needs to touched on: Radioactivity and nuclear waste. Radioactivity should incentive automation of the processes involving nuclear materials. Therefore radiation should be implemented in a way that items in a players inventory can be radioactive and therefore punish the player, but when they are in chests or machines they should have no effect on the player even if he stands on the machine. Having radioactivity be a more global thing is an option, but I don’t see many benefits to it other than being a reason to implement geiger counters.
Hazard suits should subtract from the radioactivity of an item in the inventory, making lightly radioactive materials completely non-effecting and lessening the impact of heavily radioactive materials. Radiation could be implemented in such a way that the player “absorbs” it, Fallout 4 did it that way, where radiation would reduce the maximum health points. Removing radiation from the player should be difficult, death shouldn’t reset it (maybe lower it a bit). Maybe some hard to fabricate or dungeon-loot “anti-rad”? A natural constant decay on the radiation on the player would probably also be a good idea to make lower radiation much less tedious.
ReactorCraft implements nuclear waste in a good way, as a “pseudo fluid” that can only be pumped with special waste pipes and only be stored in waste drums. RC then goes a step further and turns the waste into items when in the drums, which represent different waste isotopes and decay at different rates. I think GT can skip this last step and just have the pseudo fluid stored, without it EVER decaying. That should be the major disadvantage of nuclear energy in GT6.
So now onto the reactors: The main thing the player needs to control is the power output of the fuel and the reactivity of the fuel. Is the reactivity lower than 1, the power output of the reactor sinks, the chain reaction can’t sustain itself. If it is at 1, the output will be constant and the chain reaction controlled. Higher than one and the output rises, potentially exponentially which means “enjoy your new crater”.
Balancing reactivity should however not be able to be done directly, it should be done indirectly. This is where absorbers and moderators come in. For starters, moderators slow down neutrons allowing them to create more fission, thus increasing reactivity. Absorbers absorb neutrons into their core, lowering the number available neutrons for fission, thus lowering reactivity. Both slowing and absorbing a neutron creates a bit of heat. Different materials have different absorption or moderation properties and GT could go very deep into the topic, transforming materials when they absorb neutrons, have them decay into other stuff, etc…, but a simplification would probably suffice.
So what are these absorbers and moderators? Well control rods that are mechanically inserted or pulled out of the reactor are usually absorbers or moderators. Greg could easily provide a lot of them with different absorbtion or moderation values for many materials using his material system. For example, graphite is a common moderator. As materials also have melting points, some control rod materials may melt in the reactor, making them unable to be removed, which would be a very Greg way of ruining your reactor, potentially even your base when it were moderator rods.
Other than control rods, liquids could be used as absorbers directly around the core, water for example. A dry core would therefore be much more reactive, so keep your pumps running!
But what about temperature? As the temperature of the core increases or decreases, the absorbtion and moderation values of certain materials may also change, boiling water has a much lower absorbtion for example. The reactivity of fuel is also effected depending on the fuel type. And don’t let your fuel rods melt or your liquid fuel core solidify (Ok, the latter may be significantly harder to archive if not going with crazy fuels, but it should still be possible). Changing the water pressure to rise the water density is also an effective way to raise the absorption value, but requires better powered pumps. Water should not be the only coolant possible, heavy water would also be an obvious candidate, which has an even greater absorbtion rate.
But what about the nuclear waste that builds up in the core? Some will decay into the Xenon 135, which is a excellent neutron absorber. Normally it gets “burned up” in the reactor, i.e. when produced by decay, it instantly absorbs a neutron and turns into other waste, never building up big quantities of Xenon. However when running the reactor at a high output for a long time and then shutting it down, the waste will slowly decay into Xenon, which however doesn’t get burned, making starting the reactor up again very hard cought Chernobyl cought which can potentially lead to disaster if handled inappropriately.
So I’ve written a lot of stuff and ideas, but it’s still not a real gameplay concept, I’ll probably organize this mess into something usable this weekend.
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I get that water absorbs a relatively large amount of neutrons, but hydrogen atoms are the best moderators possible and water has two per molecule. So yeah, water is a moderator.
Heavy water is slightly worse at moderating but basically doesn’t absorb neutrons at all
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Make sure to put it into a new Post instead of editing the old one, that way notifications work and your Post isn’t lost.
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How about when the nuclear waste is destroyed or void, it releases all of it’s remaining radiation to the surroundings. Therefore, it can punishes players for voiding the waste.
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That is a huge Code problem, because it is impossible to detect when something is voided, if it was possible I could easily do that but Minecraft does not let you detect in any way when an Item is destroyed.
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What about managing all radioactive waste with some sort of multiblock structures with no physical liquid/item that could be voided?
For example, for liquid waste you could build a multiblock tank that you need to attach to your reactor pipe system.
Then this tank will slowly fill up when the reactor is active but you dont need a physical fluid for that, is just a number inside the tank. If for some reason the tank is destroyed it would release a deadly quantity of radiations in a huge area.
Regarding solid waste, right know I cant figure out any idea that doesn’t involve moveable structures (like fuel rods multiblocks). Theoretically is possible to code something like that but it would be an huuuuge task.
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