... reactor should be complex to build and have large cooling towers just for aesthetics (it is sad that there is no cooling towers in real nuclear plants in my country (because they use seawater as a coolant)). There should also be some kind of model for radioactive pollution separated from normal pollution and local evolution factor in which the local level of radioactive pollution would affect. The reactor should not emit radioactive pollution but mining and processing of uranium stuff should. Maybe there could be a place for pollution reducing modules too. But if you want to put in radioactivity as pollution you need to do the same with coal since you get more radioactive waste from coal ashes than from nuclear power plants. You would need to implement a full waste simulation instead of the general "pollution" factor we have now. I know that public perception of nuclear is that it is more complicated, dangerous, and scary than any other power source. But I would for once like to see a more realistic representation of nuclear power in a game. Especially in a sci-fi oriented game. A futuristic nuclear power plant should be small, compact, and with a very high power output. To make nuclear worse for game balancing purposes only perpetuates the myth that nuclear is not the best power source humanity have available. Nuclear should be the better version of solar without accumulators instead of some sort of coal analognuclear ...

... would be just over powered. One 3x3 tile reactor would give at least 250 MW in case of a molten salt reactor (MSR), make no pollution and zero waste (considering that nothing else leaves waste in the game). The mods that use cooling towers etc are just not realistic. You might need a cooling tower for a 1 GW+ reactor but it depends on the temperature of the input water I think. I think that we should not stick to realistic powers and energy densities. It is better to scale numbers to what game balance needs but of course keep the idea of very expensive and technically complicated but high energy density source of energy. I think that nuclear reactor should be complex to build and have large cooling towers just for aesthetics (it is sad that there is no cooling towers in real nuclear plants in my country (because they use seawater as a coolant)). There should also be some kind of model for radioactive pollution separated from normal pollution and local evolution factor in which the local level of radioactive pollution would affect. The reactor should not emit radioactive pollution but mining and processing of uranium stuff should. Maybe there could be a place for pollution reducing modules tonuclear ...

... bombs. They should be extremely expensive to research (at least 20 x rocket launching) and to manufacture (several hundreds of thousands raw materials without productivity modules) but they should be able to clear the circle with radius of 200 units at one shot. They would be useful in megabase phase when the player has almost infinite resources and production capability and needs to clear large areas for new mines. In my opinion clearing with traditional methods is annoying and boring in that phase. It is not expensive, not difficult, not very dangerous and needs no thinking but it is just laborious to click 120 destroyers and run over bases. Maybe there could be one or two lower tiers too, but very expensive and effective and not before rocket launching capabilitnuclear ...

... powe - and I love it. While I can see some improovement, this is a good base. Not too simple, not too complex. * Energy density is unrealistically low - but a low higher than bob mod best steam engines. Nice balance. The recipes are something to work on, imho. * Fusion would be the next step. I would make fusion something that requires expensive fuel, possibly FROM The output of a nuclear fission process. Unrealistic? Yes, but who cares.... this is a game, I evaluate things from a gaming perspective. * I would go with fusion as something NOT requireing water or at least extensive use of it (maybe a closed loop chiller taking some energy - low enough to handle it with some small solar cells and a battery for starting). Fusion CELLS use up (SLOWLY) and I would adjust the powered armor like this (use fusion micro cells as fuel). * For same step, a fusion reactor would use fusion cells... and due to not requiring water be a possible replacement for solar farms in outposts (most of which in my current map have no easy access to water, hence steam and nuclear is not really usable... my standard outpost temlpate drops quite some solar cells to handle the needed energy. * Obviously a Fusion Lokomotive would follow ;) This gives Fission and Fusion separate places in the game chain and puts "no water high energy density" fusion at the end of a QUITE complex manufactoring process, particularly if one keeps the requirement of fission reactors around to generate some elements for fusion cellnuclear ...

... POWER PROCESS SCALED TO FACTORIO LEVEL As far as I have read in former posts in this thread and some others, I share the idea that Factorio is not intended to clone every production process in real life, rather than showing a fun, enjoyable and simpliflied representetation of it (with much or less complexity depending on what it is about). Having that in mind the first thing is to scale reality to Factorio level. Real life is incredible, but let's not get a headache with the multiple technologies and fuel available. Clear your heads, do not get cocky and select ONE of each. I start: Conventional nuclear power in the world relies on a single aspect: the Nuclear Fuel Cycle . The nuclear fuel cycle determines the path followed by uranium and other viable fuels (like plutonium or thorium), from a mine to its final disposal as waste. http://www.tohoku-epco.co.jp/enviro/tea2005e/04/img/04d_01.gif The development of the process in the former picture, would require much effort in development and much search on information about nuclear technology. As these is not intended, and I will not enter in details about nuclear physics either, I will just make a Factorio simplification to the nuclear cycle in order to give some ideas to the dev team. (If someone wants details go to this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fuel_cycle ) The fun part and hardpart of nuclear power in Factorio would be representing a part of that process. It is really easy to put some fuel in a reactor, close the hatch and boil water in it (just the same as burning some coal and producing steam for the steam engines). So, although it is a simplification of real life, it must have a level of complexity. THE PROCESS DRAFT http://fotos.subefotos.com/ddbf1f01dc9f4d0582c045b61e836d1do.jpg The process on the image is explained further: 1) Starting with a conventional mine, we extract the ore the same way we do with copper or iron (we obtain uranium ore ). 2) The ore is transfered through conventional ways (transport belt) to a chemical plant . The next is similar to obtaining sulfuric acid with sulfur, metal and water. 3) In the chemical plant , the inputs are: ore and water; the output: let's call it uranium gas (instead of UF6). The gas will be easily trasnfered through a pipeline to the next building in the process: the Enrichment plant . 4) The enrichment plant would work like and oil refinery. This would be a new building in the game. The plant would give much discussion in the forums, due to the multiple outputs it may have. For the moment, I just projected two possibilities for enrichment. The two ways are Weapons-grade Refinement and Reactor-grade Refinement . Each grade produces wether fuel for weapons like atomic bombs and nuclear missiles, or fuel just for reactors. The different grades will also consume more or less uranium gas, but I will talk about quantities later. The output from the enrichment plant would be something like: " weaponized uranium gas " or " reactor uranium gas " depending on the refinement grade. Now we have two paths to follow: weapons-grade or reactor-grade. Weapons-grade Refinement Path 5a) The weaponized uranium gas would be transfered to another chemical plant . Combine with water, will be oxidized again to uranium oxide (let's pick a more gamely name like weaponized uranium pellet . The item will have the form of a cilinder, like a barrel but much more tiny, or even cubic form. The colour should be something strong to indicate danger: red or orange will do. 6a) Now, atomic bombs work with uranium and plutonium in metal state, so we need to transfer the weaponized uranium pellet to a conventional Factorio furnace . We will obtain uranium metal. The uranium rods would be like steel bars and would have also a dangerous colour. Let's transfer them to an assembly factory. 7a) Now we build an atomic bomb or a nuclear missile in a Factorio assembly factory . The input should be some hard items to get like blue circuits, solid fuel, etc. And there we get a bomb or a missile to throw to our beloved aliens. Reactor-grade Refinement Path 5b) The reactor uranium gas would be transfered to another chemical plant . Combine with water, will be oxidized again to uranium oxide (let's pick a more gamely name aswell like simply uranium pellet . The pellet will also have the form of a cilinder, like a barrel but much more tiny, or even cubic form. The colour should be something soft to indicate conventional use on power: brown or even grey should do it (these are the actual colours). 6b) Reactors work with fuel encapsulated in zirconium alloied rods joined together with other rods in what's called a Fuel Assembly with silvery bright. To simulate this in Factorio: we transfer the uranium pellets into a Factorio assembly factory with other inputs like steel bars and iron plates for instance. On the output we achieve the fuel assembly, called nuclear fuel . It can have cubic form and silvery bright for example. This will later be inserted into a power plant. 7b) The new star building of the nuclear process in factorio, the Nuclear Power Plant . Just insert the nuclear fuel in it and together with water, it will produce steam and electricity. A BIT ON NUMBERS - Uranium ore veins are not very common. So the quantity of fuel in the veins should be something like 3k to 4k, and the surface occupied by the vein should be little. This is just an advice. - Chemical plant reaction: 1x Uranium ore (+ water) -> 2x Uranium gas. - Enrichment plant: For weapons-grade conversion: 100x Uranium gas -> 1x Weaponized uranium gas. For reactor-grade conversion: 10x Uranium gas -> 1x Reactor uranium gas. Weaponized path - Chemical plant reaction: 5x Weaponized uranium gas -> 1x Weaponized uranium pellet. - Furnace: 20x Weaponized uranium pellet -> 1x Uranium rod. - Assembly factory: 2x Uranium rod (+ other components) -> 1x Atomic Bomb (Missile). Reactor path - Chemical plant reaction: 5x Reactor uranium gas -> 1x Uranium pellet. - Assembly factory: 40x Uranium pellet (+ steel and iron) -> 1x Nuclear fuel. - Nuclear power plant: 1x Nuclear Fuel -> 10 MW output. With this numbers: - To build an atomic bomb you would need to mine something like 10.000 units of ore. - To power a reactor you would need to mine something like 1.000 units of ore. The reactor will output something like 10 MW, which in Factorio is a huge amount of energy. The time the fuel will last in the reactor should be a lot. Like 5 or 7 Factorio days. The Weaponized uranium pellets could also be transformed into Nuclear fuel at a reduced cost. Let's say: 4x Weaponized uranium pellets -> 1x Nuclear fuel. As it is 10 times more costly to obtain weapons-grade uranium than reactor-grade. This actually happens with the dismantle of russian and american nuclear weapons. IDEAS FOR RADIATION The following points are complementary to the nuclear energy and can be implemented little by little: - Power plants do not emit radiation, unless it is a gas discharge allowed by the country's nuclear regulatory comission or during an accident event. - Radiation should be yellow because of the radiation warning trebol or blue (actual bright). But not green please, nuclear fuel does not radiate in green, that's in the Simpsons, watch video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sb9i-toCcwg . - Radiation kills depending on the dose. Factorio engineers should have a geiger dosemeter. Over a limit on the dosemeter engineers should start losing life. - Radiation should last for 7 Factorio days and if the area is occupied by a nest of aliens, aliens should mutate. - Radiation propagates if there's an event accident in form of a plume which can be modified by climate conditions. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sorry for the extension but I think this could lead to a major patch in Factorio, and should be implemented precise and with detail. Wrapping up, these are the many ideas I have to scale reality to Factorio. Please feel free all users and dev team members to critize what I posted. If need be I will answer doubts or correct things I may have left on the waNUCLEAR ...

... fuel that undergoes fission becomes two particles of nuclear waste. If you somehow use up 100% of nuclear fuel in a rod, you'll get a rod that's 100% nuclear waste, no matter what kind of reactor you used. Also I think the reactor should be producing hot water rather than electricity directly. U238 is considered waste since there are very few breeder reactors in operation (due to politics and an abundance of Uranium). It is fuel for breeders. I think you miss one point of fission. There will be stable isotopes as by-products from fission. These are not waste and are not radioactive. From a fast breeder you would only get a small fraction of the fuel as radioactive waste, the rest will be useful elements (with some medically useful radioactive isotopes). Some mass will be lost from gaseous elements and some is lost from the conversion to energy (E = mc^2). And do not forget Thorium as fuenuclear ...

... tech works. A standard real-world light water reactor burns a fairly small fraction of its input fuel (something like 80%); the remaining is either reprocessed or discarded. Note that that's only the U-235 that's used; ~95% of the total material is U-238 that is much harder to use (you need a special kind of reactor design to use it, which I believe is what the higher tier research would be). For a real-world example, the CANDU reactor design is nominally capable of directly accepting and burning used fuel from light-water reactors. It's way, way lower than that. "High-burnup" research fast reactors can only get to somewhere around 20% . The limiting condition for most fuel/reactor designs is the buildup of fission products (Xenon-135 being the most well-known, though short-lived example) that act as neutron poisons (as linked to elsewhere in this thread) and slow the reaction down. Typical reactors include burnable poisons that get less absorptive over time; as fission products build up the overall reactivity remains relatively constant. It seems you could get to maybe 5-10%[*] burnup in a typical LWR (light-water reactor = standard power reactor technology) before you have to refuel. The spent fuel can then be either stored or reprocessed to remove the detrimental fission products and produce "new" fuel, consisting of a substantial proportion of Plutonium as well as Uranium. Reprocessing into new fuel rods is also really icky chemically and mostly not economical at current Uranium prices, but it might be an interesting mechanic to include. [*]It's way more complicated than a simple percentage, but it's close enough for Factorio purposes. So, to give a reasonably real-world compatible reaction set: Preparation: 10x raw uranium -> 9x depleted uranium + 1x fissile fuel Power generation: 1x fissile fuel --> 1x spent fuel Reprocessing: 1x spent fuel -> 1x raw uranium 10% is pretty lame by Factorio standards, but it's far from completely used up. The real tech advance would be to use a fancier reactor design, because then you can use up everything -- raw uranium, depleted uranium, spent fuel, whatever. 10% efficiency on the enrichment side is in the ballpark (real-world ~4%). The interesting mechanic from a Factorio perspective, though, is that enrichment is MASSIVELY power-intensive and would serve as a useful balancing mechanism. For a typical plant of 1500MWe, you need ~25t of enriched Uranium, derived from ~200t of natural Uranium, at a total energy cost of around 24TJ for centrifuge enrichment and 1000TJ for gas-diffusion enrichment (easy tech-tree opportunity!). Enrichment would also be a new mechanic in that it's progressive - each enrichment stage only does a little bit, say from 0.7% ore feed to 0.9% output, so you need to chain a bunch of them to get to your target of 3-5%. And yes, there could be an "advanced" reactor tech that unlocks something like a Fast reactor that can burn the spent fuenuclear ...

... fuel that undergoes fission becomes two particles of nuclear waste. If you somehow use up 100% of nuclear fuel in a rod, you'll get a rod that's 100% nuclear waste, no matter what kind of reactor you used. Also I think the reactor should be producing hot water rather than electricity directlnuclear ...

... fuel is its ability to produce heat, minus how much effort it takes to get it to produce heat. When fission fuel undergoes chain reaction, it eventually degenerates into the sort of fuel that's not usable. That's because in fission, nuclear number (type of element) can only go down but not up (that would be fusion), and every particle of the fuel rod will progress towards the point where it becomes the element that can't be used as fuel, and at that point the particle becomes waste. So inevitably, you're winding up with 100% of fuel becoming nuclear waste. The "reuse" process you describe is actually salvaging whatever little useful material left in fuel rods to use in making new rods, it's not the same as using waste material to produce new fuel rods. So in the chain you described, the recipe that recycles spent rods must produce 1x raw uranium and 9x nuclear waste material. I guess you put it in barrels and just having it around produces pollution constantly, and I guess there could be special "crates" (underground storages) that minimize pollution from nuclear waste. Actually, in a regular light water reactor you do breed and use Plutonium (going up in nuclear number). They have a breeder factor of about 0.6 meaning that they produce 60 % of their fuel by raising the atomic number. Breeder reactors, ie. breeder factor over 1, can use about 98% of all the fuel put in by breeding fertile material (U238 or Th235(iirc)) into Pu239 or U233 that are fissile. The very small amount of waste you get from this will be gone in about 300 years. In general the amount of nuclear waste (spent fuel) you get from light water reactors is incredibly small and very easy and safe to store in water pools for decades or more. Hence the pollution of nuclear is very very low. From a breeder reactor you get about 1-2 % of that already small amount as waste. For gameplay terms I guess that nuclear would be just over powered. One 3x3 tile reactor would give at least 250 MW in case of a molten salt reactor (MSR), make no pollution and zero waste (considering that nothing else leaves waste in the game). The mods that use cooling towers etc are just not realistic. You might need a cooling tower for a 1 GW+ reactor but it depends on the temperature of the input water I thinnuclear ...

... fuel fission. To become nuclear fuel again through beta decay, the particle will have to consume hundreds of neutrons on average, in practice this rarely happen and most of material is non-radioactive. But because fission products nuclear mass and neutron absorption is random, some nucleus will beta-decay upwards high enough to become radioactive, and some fission products are heavy enough to be radioactive to begin with, so nuclear waste will contain radioactive material and not just random mash of low atomic number non-radioactive matter. Note that even if it's not radioactive, it's still poisonous - many elements are, and there are many elements in the waste. And then some chemical reactions may occur in the waste, too. That's what makes it dangerous - it's both radioactive and poisonous, and there's no easy way to separate elements because there's so many of them, normal chemical reagents only have a handful, not dozens and possibly hundreds. Just to be clear, I'm referring to 100% waste, not spent fuel rods. My point is, as you use up fuel, the unusable waste should build up. The mash of random elements that's radioactive and can't be really used as fuel nor anything else. For game's sake you can go without waste altogether, but it was in original suggestion that waste becomes fuel, rather than fuel remains are extracted from waste which then remains permanently, and so I arguenuclear ...

... fuel is its ability to produce heat, minus how much effort it takes to get it to produce heat. When fission fuel undergoes chain reaction, it eventually degenerates into the sort of fuel that's not usable. That's because in fission, nuclear number (type of element) can only go down but not up (that would be fusion), and every particle of the fuel rod will progress towards the point where it becomes the element that can't be used as fuel, and at that point the particle becomes waste. So inevitably, you're winding up with 100% of fuel becoming nuclear waste. From the wikipedia article on Neutron poison In practice, buildup of reactor poisons in nuclear fuel is what determines the lifetime of nuclear fuel in a reactor: long before all possible fissions have taken place, buildup of long-lived neutron-absorbing fission products damps out the chain reaction. This is the reason that nuclear reprocessing is a useful activity: solid spent nuclear fuel contains about 97% of the original fissionable material present in newly manufactured nuclear fuel. Chemical separation of the fission products restores the fuel so that it can be used again. Now some reactor designs do a better job of consuming reaction-dampening fission products including I believe the one Bill Gates is into ( TWR design ), these designs can consume a much larger fraction of the fissionable/breedable material, apparently up to 20-35%. But a process which relies on reprocessing to re-use the fuel is completely reasonable, especially if it is intended to also be able to make nuclear weaponnuclear ...

... fuel is its ability to produce heat, minus how much effort it takes to get it to produce heat. When fission fuel undergoes chain reaction, it eventually degenerates into the sort of fuel that's not usable. That's because in fission, nuclear number (type of element) can only go down but not up (that would be fusion), and every particle of the fuel rod will progress towards the point where it becomes the element that can't be used as fuel, and at that point the particle becomes waste. So inevitably, you're winding up with 100% of fuel becoming nuclear waste. The "reuse" process you describe is actually salvaging whatever little useful material left in fuel rods to use in making new rods, it's not the same as using waste material to produce new fuel rods. So in the chain you described, the recipe that recycles spent rods must produce 1x raw uranium and 9x nuclear waste material. I guess you put it in barrels and just having it around produces pollution constantly, and I guess there could be special "crates" (underground storages) that minimize pollution from nuclear wastnuclear ...

... waste simply can not be put back into the cycle. You already used up whatever useful material was in the fuel rods, so spent rods mostly contain nuclear material that has radioactivity so low it can't be used as nuclear fuel, which also means it'll have insanely long half-life -thousands of years- before the next highly radioactive element comes out of ongoing fission reaction, and even then it'll be stretched over even more thousands of years because of very long half-life. Thus you call it "waste", there's nothing you could do to make it worthwhile and it forever will remain unusable, the only thing left to do with it is to put it in the place where residual radioactivity wouldn't cause a lot of damage, and plan to store it there for millenia. That is... not how current nuclear tech works. A standard real-world light water reactor burns a fairly small fraction of its input fuel (something like 80%); the remaining is either reprocessed or discarded. Note that that's only the U-235 that's used; ~95% of the total material is U-238 that is much harder to use (you need a special kind of reactor design to use it, which I believe is what the higher tier research would be). For a real-world example, the CANDU reactor design is nominally capable of directly accepting and burning used fuel from light-water reactors. Also, radioactivity and usefulness are actually not particularly correlated. U-235 -- that primary and very easy to use isotope that feeds both simple weapons and standard light-water reactors -- has a half-life of ~700M years. Most of the true waste actually has much shorter half-lives. ------ So, to give a reasonably real-world compatible reaction set: Preparation: 10x raw uranium -> 9x depleted uranium + 1x fissile uel Power generation: 1x fissile fuel --> 1x spent fuel Reprocessing: 1x spent fuel -> 1x raw uranium 10% is pretty lame by Factorio standards, but it's far from completely used up. The real tech advance would be to use a fancier reactor design, because then you can use up everything -- raw uranium, depleted uranium, spent fuel, whateveNuclear ...

... waste simply can not be put back into the cycle. You already used up whatever useful material was in the fuel rods, so spent rods mostly contain nuclear material that has radioactivity so low it can't be used as nuclear fuel, which also means it'll have insanely long half-life -thousands of years- before the next highly radioactive element comes out of ongoing fission reaction, and even then it'll be stretched over even more thousands of years because of very long half-life. Thus you call it "waste", there's nothing you could do to make it worthwhile and it forever will remain unusable, the only thing left to do with it is to put it in the place where residual radioactivity wouldn't cause a lot of damage, and plan to store it there for milleniNuclear ...

... power plant: water, fuel rods, spent fuel water pool: spent fuel, water. Closed fuel cycle would need: ore, refining, fuel rod, power plant, fuel reprocessing plant: spent fuel ->fuel rod, spent fuel (5 % of the amount from the previous tech), fuel rods sent back to power plant. This would make nuclear energy difficult to set up but rewarding, and I'm interested by the idea of a closed fuel cycle however I still think there should be some form of waste that is difficult to deal with and can't just be plugged straight back in to the cycle. Granted, I'm not exactly read up on nuclear energy but as far as I know it does generate a fair bit of nuclear waste which we then have to do something with. Didn't America make a radioactive mountain or something? Either just dumping the waste and letting the pollution (or another factor "radiation") rise, or properly handling it by some tedious means like spreading it out and burying it over a large area, provides a tough choice and interesting mechanics, and is a 'good' downside to nuclear power. I mean currently some players choose to stick with steam power because it's far more compact than solar and I like to see choices. Perhaps I want to build acres of solar farms because in this game I can't be bothered dealing with the extra pollution or something, it's no fun if every game plays out the same because there isn't any choicnuclear ...

... I have done it: https://forums.factorio.com/search.php?keywords=nuclear&t=5&sf=msgonly 10 pages out of 22 for the total thread contain "nuclear" as word... :) :) I thought I'd post my thing here since it seems to be a main electricity posnuclear". ...

... I have done it: https://forums.factorio.com/search.php?keywords=nuclear&t=5&sf=msgonly 10 pages out of 22 for the total thread contain "nuclear" as word... nuclear". ...

... would be an excellent idea for Factorio. Nuclear in real life is very very fuel efficient and produces very low amounts of waste that is easily contained in pools of water for long periods of time. For the game it could be cool with two techs: open fuel cycle and closed fuel cycle nuclear power. The open fuel cycle would need: uranium ore, uranium refining (chemical plant: water, acid), fuel rod manufacturing (assembler: uranium, steel), nuclear power plant: water, fuel rods, spent fuel water pool: spent fuel, water. Closed fuel cycle would need: ore, refining, fuel rod, power plant, fuel reprocessing plant: spent fuel ->fuel rod, spent fuel (5 % of the amount from the previous tech), fuel rods sent back to power plant. The energy content of refined uranium should be in the gigajoule-range. The building of the nuclear plant should have a resource range close to the rocket silo. Nuclear plants are expensive to build but provide tremendous amounts of cheap, clean, and safe electricity. Perhaps make a previous tech with nuclear batteries, say 5 MW unit that just need water and fuel rod that connects to regular boilernuclear ...

... waste which you would then need to deal with. This is either automatically dumped and just kills the land (and eventually the player) around the reactor (maybe has an outlet that can be directed with pipes), or produces an item "depleted uranium" which you then need to deal with (maybe have limited uses such as for weapons). Either way destroying it would generate radiation or just absurd amounts of pollution which could later be tied in to "pollution over a certain value causes damage to the player and can be mitigated with filters in your power armour" which would certainly make for an interesting late-game mechanic as pollution increases exponentially. You could argue that fusion reactors have all the pros of solar panels and simply trade the low output con with a much higher build cost, and perhaps that is something the devs will go for but it's a fairly close choice and it wouldn't be feasible until late game so you'll already need to have some sort of large scale power production anyway. More likely the "huge initial cost" option will be included in building the rocket so that you can move your solar panels to space or something which is another project the devs are already considerinnuclear ...

... energy is the waste that would be created. Just like cracking oil, you need to make use of the other products (in the case of nuclear) you would have spent fuel which you need to either contain or use. If the control of waste comes to a halt, all nuclear power will STOP, and potentially cause a melt-down. You could make barrels for storage, build storage FACILITIES and of course use it as an ingredient for devious production of goods! An idea I had was to use the waste to create ammunition of superior damage (like depleted uranium shells) and NUKES which could be used on the biters. It could be made HIGHLY affective but there's a twist, it could also potentially enable your enemies to evolve at a faster rate! On top of having nuclear power, you could make a requirement of pumping water to cool the reactors and have uranium ore processing etc enuclear ...