How would one make a reactor harder to produce over time?

Question

I have been asking myself this question recently.

How would you make a reactor powering a powerful weapon harder to produce for each successive reactor being produced?

My solutions currently would be :

• One reactor construction/design needs to be pre-calculated by a simulation with a supercomputer and the difficulty of the computation would be exponential. But why would the computation need to be redone for building the next reactor?
• Another solution would be to make the reactors hard to build and only one could be built at a time for various reasons. But then it would mean the construction time could be static or random but not strictly increasing with time.

What other limiting factors could be employed?

Answer 1

Something based on randomness, difficult to reproduce. E.G.:

The reactor is extremely efficient because all the radiation that does not directly contribute to the energy output like neutrons and beta particle is reflected inside and recycled. However the reflecting surfaces rely on particular random patterns etched on them. The random patterns are so difficult to produce that getting the right reactor is a matter of chance.

Answer 2

To offer a different answer to the previous:

The reactors interfere with each other in increasingly hard to predict ways.

Reactor one takes no effort to build. It’s discovered almost at random.

Reactor two blows up several times. Each time a corresponding dip in power output at reactor one is noted. Eventually shielding is devised based on the distance between the reactors.

Reactor 3 doesn’t blow up, but it does turn reactor one into a pile of slag. After much careful testing reactor 1 is rebuilt and all three reactors now work. The theories on how the reactors interact are now wildly divisive within the scientific community.

Reactor 4 takes years of testing before anyone dreams of turning it on. These tests reveal deep and complex models of the long distance reactor interactions. It is turned on with no issues.

Reactor 5 is built according to the best known model of reactor interaction, but preflight checks reveal that the model is flawed. Half a decade of testing and improvements later the reactor is tentatively brought online.

The modelling process alone takes years for reactor six, and the most recent understanding of how and why the reactors work shows that reactors seven and eight will take a decade of design each, with design and test complexity (and appropriate modifications to existing reactors) growing exponentially with each extra reactor.

Physicists are genuinely unsure if more than 17 reactors can be built. Debate rages, and all the while no new reactors are built for fear of disturbing the fragile six reactor setup.

The word ‘quantum’ is used a lot.

Answer 3

One option would be to have the reactor require some very rare material, so it's easy to find enough of the material for the first one, but each successive reactor requires looking harder and harder to mine/gather enough of it as more of the readily-available deposits are used up.

Answer 4

The reactor requires a hyper rare material to be used within it.

Once used the material has no known way to recycle it.

Thus each new weapon produced makes it far more difficult to produce the next.

To mitigate this engineers are forced to use more creative designs, more expensive modelling, and improved manufacturing technologies in order to use the least amount of this material.

This leads to the knowledge and capabilities to work with this material becoming highly valuable, and due to its weaponisable nature it becomes a secret of national importance.

The state then adds further red tape and bureaucracy to the situation to control the resource itself, and regulate who can posses it, and certify who has the technical capabilities to work with it.

Answer 5

This kind of reactor requires some specific substance at extremely high purity, as a catalyst, shielding or similar. But the reactor produces a kind of pollution that affects that very substance (perhaps only that substance, perhaps not; perhaps its natural deposits, perhaps it gets into the substance during processing). Purifying that substance to the levels required to build another reactor gets exponentially more difficult the more such reactors are already in operation (as new batches of the substance are increasingly more contaminated).

(Inspiration from real life: Low-background steel vs. newly smelted steel that got contaminated with radionuclides from the air used in the smelting.)

Answer 6

The reactors suck.... a special and rare kind of energy from the nearby universe. This energy gets produced continuously but at a very slow rate.

You can build and second reactor easily, but now you have two reactors half as strong as the first one used to be. In order to build a second useful reactor, you need to increase its sucking distance (which is impossible with current technology) or move its sucking centre by a few light seconds, which is possible, but very expensive.

Answer 7

This assumes something more fantastical than a nuclear reactor.

Each reactor has some sort of 'frequency' to its energy output. If two reactors within X miles have frequencies too similar to each other, they will resonate and cause a runaway reaction, killing everyone. X miles happens to be the size of a typical country or region. To avoid catastrophe, each reactor must have a different frequency output, but it becomes progressively harder to engineer a reactor as the required output frequency increases (or decreases).

This way, every country can easily build one reactor that outputs energy at the lowest/highest allowable frequency, and then move up the cost scale as they build more.

Answer 8

Soul Power: Reactors are powered by Ghosts

Okay bear with me here, but it's less that reactors cost more (inherently) and more that the more of them there are the less efficient they are, and so the extra cost for additional reactors is in increased efficiency or increased siphon range.

The thing is, Reactors are powered by the resonant energy of ghosts (Soul Power), and have a range of about 25,000km (a little over twice the radius of earth). As we all know, ghosts maintain inertia in their frame of reference to the sun, not the earth (this is why they only manifest for a short period once a year).

You can't just create multiple reactors, because they're all siphoning energy from the same pool of ghosts. Ultimately there are three ways to increase the power output of reactors:

• Increase the range at which the Reactors can siphon soul power. This is only practical for a couple of reactors due to the logarithmic increase of cost/range.
• Increase the efficiency of the Reactors. This does cause older Reactors to also become less efficient (they're able to pull a small share of the soul power) and means that in addition to having to design better reactors, old reactors have to be decommissioned or upgraded.
• Kill a lot of people. More ghosts = More power. Fortunately this happens naturally, more and more people are born every year, and eventually they'll all die. In fact killing people prematurely might lead to short term gains in soul power, but will likely lead to reduced long term yields as the birthrate will also go down.

Answer 9

I remember reading a book a long time ago (I don't remember the name of it now) in which a superweapon required using massive banks of supercomputers to manipulate quantum-entangled particles at high speed. The effect of this weapon was the ability to simultaneously manipulate all other particles at least on a planetary if not a universal level. If I recall correctly, the first weapons test involved the quantum teleportation of a moon.

However, trying to operate two of these weapons at the same time would be nearly impossible because of the entangled nature of the particles at the center of this weapon. You'd need at least enough computing power to predict and counteract the supercomputers at the core of the other weapons.

Answer 10

Each reactor has a higher and higher toll on the planet humanity... the factions creating the devices become more desperate and intent on "winning" and don't realize until deep into the conflict as to the true cost of their reactors. Often this concept has a precept with some level of "good" intent before the consequences are revealed.

Answer 11

After building the first reactor your government realizes how powerful it is and decides that no one else but them should have control of a reactor like this. So they go to war to blow up any competing reactors being built. Additional reactors get harder as either you have to be very good friends with the people who built the first one, be a big enough superpower that the first people wont attack you, or build it deep underground in secret and hope no one notices.

Your reactor could also give of some sort of radiation (or leave behind a deadly waste product) such that the local population no longer one wants it built in their backyard. So it gets harder to find politically/geologically safe places to build additional reactors.

Answer 12

A dark ages, society no longer possess the knowledge or skill to make new designs. They can make copies of existing designs, but the tooling need in the manufacturing is getting old and failing.

Answer 13

The reactor can be built only in a very specific spot of this planet

If the reactor requires a very peculiar geographic feature to work correctly, this could make very hard to build another one. The first already occupies the only suitable place where it can be built; if the spots (as proposed below) are in hard-to-reach places, the first will probably be built in the best one, so that the eventual other reactors will require an increasingly harder effort to build.

About the reason why a reactor must be constrained to a specific location on Earth, I can think of some possibilities (warning: heavy handwavium ahead), but probably it is possible to find some simpler explanations

• It requires a very tall (order of 1-2 km) and thin (order of some cm) vertical structure to accelerate some chargeless particles: because of Coriolis force, particles tend to deflect from the straight structure (because of Earth rotation, its top rotates slightly faster than its base), and being chargeless, they can't be forced in a straight line by an electromagnetic field: as a result, you can build such reactor only near the North/South pole.

• It requires a very precise value of gravity, slightly lower than the value at sea level... The exact value can be found at more or less 6.5km of height above sea level.

• It requires to be placed in the middle of a volume of at least 300m of radius of not.salty water (which means that it can be built only in the lake Bajkal, I suppose)

Answer 14

Public opinion is against the production of nuclear reactors, with opposition growing more intense with each reactor

Regardless of the actual risk, as long as public opinion is against the production of nuclear reactors and becomes more strident and intense, the cost to produce a reactor will increase.

This can occur due to additional regulation requiring increasing amounts of over-engineering.

This can be a result of construction delays and paperwork costs due to additional environmental studies or more extensive licensing requirements.

This can be due to lawsuits opposing the construction that can be delay construction or run up legal costs.

Answer 15

The reactor and weapon require complex quantum entanglement calculations. Maybe it uses virtual particles popping into existence just outside a singularity or something like that. As the number of reactors there are in a region of space increases the complexity of the equations goes up by !n and they all decrease in efficiency.

Answer 16

The reactor needs constant maintenance by extremely skilled specialists

The problem is not really building the reactor, but running it. The reactor technology is highly unstable and needs constant maintenance and adjusting. The complex physics you have to understand to even be able to adjust the reactor and keep it running are only understood by a few people on the planet. And the engineering to adjust and repair the complex parts, are so complex that only three people on the planet usually get it right on the first try. And a wrong application severly damages the reactor and creates weeks of downtime.

The limiting factor is the amount of genius physicists and engineers available. They are needed constantly and each reactor has its own set of quirks and problems, because minimal differences in building materials produce different runtime characteristics. Each reactor could also have its own set of software algorithms which are fine tuned and constantly updated, adding a whole team of specialized software engineers to the required personell to keep a reactor running.

Since the best people in the field are already working on the first reactor, building a second one will be much harder, because you can't easily create skilled professionals in this narrow field out of thin air.

Answer 17

More reactors complicate the powergrid

Some of this is from my layman understanding of power production, but it should be accurate enough for a story if no hard science is required.

If the reactors are all connected to the same power grid, you could say that the power management becomes more difficult.

Even in the real world, this is a large issue; Reactors don't turn on and off at the press of a button, they have spinup and spindown times.

Remember, a reactor in the real world is often just a producer of heat, and we're not talking just 110 degree Celsius, which would be 10 above boiling water, we're talking 500+, in order to make steam, that is used by turbines to produce electricity. And these are BIG. So they are slow to cool, and slow to stop or slow down spinning. So they constantly produce

But excess electricity isn't just stored in magical hammer space. It's like pressure in a pipe, it has to go SOMEWHERE. If you don't feed it to the weapon, there are wires and capacitors that are going to heat up, and that's going to cause interesting reactions in said capacitors. (Don't stand near them, is what I'm saying)

Having extra reactors could complicate the power grid, especially if the grid is separate from a city or nationwide grid.

If each reactor is paired up with a separate reactor on individual power grids, this is less likely to be the issue, but if they are all connected, and feeding one singular weapon, management of these systems would be a cause for making the setup harder, if not the actual construction.

TLDR; You can contrive the technology for energy management to be such that having multiple reactors requires more and more intense infrastructure

Answer 18

The reactor is sensitive to small forces

As long as your species is planet bound, the only spots to build Reactors are the poles of the planets, since everywhere else the Coriolis force would disturb the delicate processes within.

Once you get spaceships, you can build much more efficient Reactors in the Lagrange points around the planet (points without any net gravitational force, where you don't even need to account for downwards gravity). The output of these Reactors is so much higher that looking for other planets/asteroids to settle quickly becomes uneconomical (Reactors are expensive). The problem is, each Reactor has to be placed at the exact center of the respective L-point, and their containment shielding doesn't leave room for another (the EM flux expulsion spikes of two Reactors can't ever touch, or else), and there are only 7 Lagrange points in the vicinity of earth... (L1-L5 of the earth/moon system, and - at considerably greater distance - L1 and L2 of the earth-sun system).

If you want to beam the power to your planetary/orbital industry (eg. to charge up death star capacitors), or to use it as a defensive weapon, the further you are away, the lower the efficiency becomes. So you could use the L4/L5 points of the earth/sun system, but would need extremely fine-tuned microwave laser optics (and probably refocusing waystations) to transmit the power to where you need it. Same goes for the Lagrange points of other planets - you need to get all the components there, and the efficiency is much worse unless you develop even better ways of long-distance power transportation.

All this only applies if interplanetary transportation is somewhat hard in your setting - if you can easily use thousands of warp-enabled battery ships to transfer the power to your death star, this becomes the much smaller issue of supply line management (the ships and your physical spread are still vulnerabilities, but no longer prohibitive costs).

Answer 19

Designing a functioning reactor is extremely difficult but if you can pull it off, the reactor's output can make you fantastically wealthy. The first scientist to build a working reactor patented the design, refused to license it, and retired in style due to the large royalty checks. He absolutely refuses to build a second reactor. Artificial scarcity keep prices high and retirement comfortable.

Over time, more working reactor designs are created, but they all tend to follow the same model. None are mass-produced because the inventors want to keep prices as high as possible.

The reactor industry has become a patent minefield. With every successful reactor design, it gets harder and harder to design a reactor that doesn't infringe on someone's existing patent. The patent holders are extremely aggressive about pursuing potential infringers, so the legal processes associated with building a reactor soon start to take more time than the scientific design and construction.