Radbolt cooling

[calibayzone]

Playing without steam turbines makes for some unique cooling solutions. Radbolts are made out of 1kg genetic ooze at a nice 20C, and every time they come out of a radbolt reflector, joint-plate, etc the temperature resets. So, lets keep our lava from boiling from our niobium volcano! For an ~8600 rad/cycle (860 radbolt/cycle) nuclear waste infinite storage, each 50-bolt radbolt heats the igneous rock generator about 1.8C (144kDTU, or 720kDTU if you eventually let the generator melt). You get about 3.7C of cooling for this ~14000 kg lava pool for each radbolt (51800 kDTU), which far greater and can solidify a smallish pool in a reasonable amount of time. A radbolt is sent out every 175 seconds or so but the generator is only on about 36 seconds.

Thus, for ~100 W of power, you get a powerful 296kDTU/s of cooling (about 24 hydrogen wheezeworts). A thermium aquatuner on supercoolant could make a lead or aluminum pool if cooling a base is desired, although the max temperature is somewhat lower.

The logic turns off the radbolt generator once it makes a radbolt, and turns it on after enough time (filter gate set to 148 s, could go a bit lower) for the old bolt to decay.

 

 

[blakemw]

Playing around with this mechanism, it turns out that radbolt heat exchange is highly proportional to the thermal conductivity: probably using debris in tile rule.

Using a high TC heat exchange medium such as petroleum seems to make it reasonably viable even with lower temperature deltas. I tried making a Research Reactor with the Steam Turbines being cooled by Radbolts instead of Aquatuners: it needed two Radbolt Generators but did work. ST/AQ is more energy efficient than the radbolt generators because of energy recovery, but the radbolt generators are potentially simpler when there is a massive abundance of radiation and you don't need to care about energy efficiency.