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mekanism / Mekanism-Feature-Requests

All enhancements and feature requests for Mekanism (for current and future releases) should go here.
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Fusion reactor creates helium, which can be used for cooling a fission reactor #215

Open beholderface opened 3 years ago

beholderface commented 3 years ago

Feature description: When running, the fusion reactor produces helium at a speed equal to the current fuel injection rate/however much plain dt fuel is in the reactor. The produced helium can be output from a reactor port and run through a machine (rotary condensentrator or something new specifically for this purpose) to produce liquid helium, which can be put in a fission reactor and is a more effective coolant than sodium. The spent coolant helium could then be recycled (through a boiler or another of the special machine I mentioned earlier in the post) and be sent back to the reactor. The special machine would probably be something like a supercooler multiblock that consumes energy to cool the helium enough to get it to become a liquid. Once the reactor's buffer is full, the produced helium is just voided. Alternatives: idk make more fission reactors I guess Context: The temperature of liquid helium is approximately 4 degrees kelvin, and it is used to cool things like superconducting magnets and high-energy physics experiments (such as the Large Hadron Collider). If this was added, it could allow people to create max size reactors that run at their maximum burn rate of 1920mb/t without overheating, for the people who want to produce truly absurd amounts of radioisotopes or a lot of antimatter. This suggestion is not designed with power generation in mind, so the supercooler could consume a lot of energy to accomplish its task.

SteelBlue8 commented 3 years ago

That is a pretty cool idea, but personally I think that making liquid helium should require a bit more specialized machinery than simply a condensentrator.

beholderface commented 3 years ago

That is a pretty cool idea, but personally I think that making liquid helium should require a bit more specialized machinery than simply a condensentrator.

Which is why I mentioned the possibility of a special supercooler machine.

voidsong-dragonfly commented 3 years ago

That's.... not how liquid helium works. It's not particularly good for what you're aiming for. What you'd be using it for, actually, in a nuclear reactor, would be a high-temperature inert gas. Gas-core reactor, helium heated to ~4800K or so (max before you cause other problems), run it through a turbine by itself to cool down then recycle. Liquid helium is actually a pretty bad coolant compared to water, it's just cold.