[mod] "realistic" nuclear mod

[vladts]

Hello!

There is some mods for minetest, which contains radioactivity, uranium and so on.
But I didn't find mod, which calculates radioactivity processes in realistic manner.

So I started my own.

It contains:

Nodes:

uranium
graphite
nuclear wastes
cadmium

Tools:

radioactivity measure tool, which shows content of uranium node and it's radioactivity level

Other:

reactor meltdown and drilling hole to the deep by melted uranium

Uranium block by default contains 3.25% of U235, 96.75% of U238 and 0% of Pu239. U235, U238 and Pu have their own levels of natural radioactivity. Also, U235 and Pu, after slow neutron consumtion, emits more fast neutrons, heats and transforms into waste. U238 after fast neutron consumption transforms into Pu.

Graphite transforms some part of fast neutrons into slow.

When uranium block heats over 627 C,it starts glowing red. After heating over 1132 C it melts. Melted uranium is a liquid source. Also it can burn nodes under him. And it is a falling node.

Building reactor from uranium blocks and graphite:



And wait for a few minutes...



Water cooling of radioactive blocks still not implemented, only air cooling. So it's very easy to overheat reactor.

This reactor hs been melted many times:


Source code:
https://github.com/vladtcvs/minetest-nuclear

[ChimneySwift]

Wow!

This looks really cool. I have a bit of an interest in nuclear power and I love these kinds of mods. I'll definitely have to check this one out. That said I can't see why someone would make a nuclear reactor other than it looking cool? Do you have plans to expand this mod to generate power in mods like technic by chance? Or am I missing something?

[vladts]

I think I will write something like this, to make reactor a bit more useful than just melting ground.

[vladts]

Now I have a big problem with performance of my mod, because calculation of neutrons takes O(n^(7/3)), where n - number of blocks.

[TechNolaByte]

pretty cool! i always love it when i see multi block structures
atm i cant find any practical purpose to not letting one melt down

[vladts]

Water cooling and improvements of temperature calculations

[vladts]

Automatic reactor control. Neutrons detector (under the reactor) measures number of neutrons and controller moves cadmium block into the reactor, if it's too many neutrons

[TechNolaByte]

can you make this support technic energy?

[vladts]

I think about this. But I don't want to do some 'magical' converter to energy. Real nuclear reactors heats flowing water, water transforms into steam and steam rotates turbine. In minetest we don't have neither steam, neither real flowing water. So I think, what heat-to-energy converter should do.

[Byakuren]

You would need to implement those liquid transport systems I guess. You could also use a thermopile, but that is unrealistic in that it is inefficient and probably cannot extract heat very quickly from a reactor.

A Minecraft mod that implements nuclear reactors in a nice way is ReactorCraft, in case you want to check it out.

[Fixer]

Nice, we need more reactors :)