A Case for Balancing Nuclear Power

[foamy]

For a row of 16 heat exchangers (which you need per reactor in larger setups) you need 3 pumps. I have one between the reactor and heat exchangers and 2 on the outer end.

You only need 12 per row if you share the heat pipe line. That lets you feed them off a single offshore pump and doesn't require a power pump on the output, and also matches neatly with 20 turbines per row. You can even go down to 11 per row if you don't mind losing a couple of percent of maximum sustained generation in very large setups. This setup tessellates at 14 reactors (and 20 rows), so your heat output for the 2x row is 4480n - 160 MW, and your heat consumption is 4400n MW.

4480n - 4400n = 160 -> 80n = 160 -> n = 2. You only start losing capacity at all after 56 reactors, and beyond that it will tend towards a loss of ~1.8% to the peak sustained generation.

[Honktown]

As far as UPS goes, the best way to deal with it is decreasing the number of buildings. That can be achieved by adding additional tiers of steam turbine that work at higher temperatures, or simply increasing the max temperature of nuclear steam and the heat pipe system in the first place. You could even mod that in, I think, to try it out.

Can you raise the max temp of the reactor from 1000°C?

I looked at some other nuclear mods and it appears as if the reactor prototype does have a heat buffer with a settable max temperature in code. There's no "heat pump" entity so you can never make one heat buffer hotter than the reactor or other equivalent heat generator, but from my very brief and inexpert look, I don't see any reason why you couldn't make a reactor/exchanger/turbine set that went up to 10,000 degrees if you wanted. Although at that stage I think in real life you're stripping the water down into plasma...

ETA nah apparently plasma is much higher temp than that so you're good.

I am going to report it as a bug eventually, that turbines can only reach 1000 C, even if everything else works. There's a bug in the game in .16/.17 (someone else tested) that at 1000 C, turbines just stop accepting steam, and it can't even pass through. Heat pipes work fine, reactors work fine, tanks store the steam fine, the turbines just fail to accept it. It's very easy to test. There's a mod called "Advanced Nuclear 0.16 fix": https://mods.factorio.com/mod/AdvancedNuclear2

In it you can set turbine power output, and it will according match the heat exchangers, and something on the reactor, but I think the actual reactor consumption is separate so that has to be turned up too. I had turbines set to 50x normal output. Steam was around 24500 C if I recall correctly, and everything worked fine except the turbines. Fiddled with it and thought the mod was broken, except a normal turbine wouldn't work either. Both worked on normal steam, and after cutting the power down a bit, kept testing it and at 1000 C the turbines instantly started working. There's absolutely nothing in the entity/prototype/whatever description which implies they have a limited temperature before they just quit (the max temperature is used for efficiency/performance reasons, not as the actual temperature permitted, which is why you can use steam engines on 500 C steam).

I had seen discussions on people pushing more 500 C steam through heat exchangers (you can only push a few 1200 units before you run out of pipe interfaces), and then saw a few mods that increased temps a little, but I couldn't find anything related to anyone testing absurd steam values, or hitting a random barrier.

[Adamo]

To be clear, are you saying that the turbine simply shuts down when you tried to put steam above 1000C into it? Because I think that's expected. The prototype definition for the generator (the type of which the turbine is) includes a value for "maximum_temperature", but it doesn't explain exactly what it does, except that it explains it is mandatory if you're using a fluid_box. But if you look at the prototype definition for fluid_box, you see it has a more clear explanation for its maximum_temperature value:

https://wiki.factorio.com/Types/FluidBo ... emperature

"The maximum temperature allowed into the fluidbox."

This says to me that fluid above 1000C, unless the maximum_temperature is set higher on the turbine's fluid_box, will simply not be allowed into the entity's internal production fluid_box and therefore it will not run. But if the temperature of the fluid is above the maximum_temperature of the turbine, but not above the maximum_temperature of the turbine's fluid_box, I would guess that the turbine probably operates as if the fluid's temperature is the turbine's maximum_temperature value. Is that consistent with what you are seeing?

[Honktown]

To be clear, are you saying that the turbine simply shuts down when you tried to put steam above 1000C into it? Because I think that's expected. The prototype definition for the generator (the type of which the turbine is) includes a value for "maximum_temperature", but it doesn't explain exactly what it does, except that it explains it is mandatory if you're using a fluid_box. But if you look at the prototype definition for fluid_box, you see it has a more clear explanation for its maximum_temperature value:

https://wiki.factorio.com/Types/FluidBo ... emperature

"The maximum temperature allowed into the fluidbox."

This says to me that fluid above 1000C, unless the maximum_temperature is set higher on the turbine's fluid_box, will simply not be allowed into the entity's internal production fluid_box and therefore it will not run. But if the temperature of the fluid is above the maximum_temperature of the turbine, but not above the maximum_temperature of the turbine's fluid_box, I would guess that the turbine probably operates as if the fluid's temperature is the turbine's maximum_temperature value. Is that consistent with what you are seeing?

To quote the Advanced Nuclear entity info:
...
local tempChange = 485*turbinePower
local steamTemp = 15 + tempChange
...
advTurbine.maximum_temperature = steamTemp
...

As per the turbine fluid box:

fluid_box =
{
base_area = 1,
height = 2,
base_level = -1,
pipe_covers = pipecoverspictures(),
pipe_connections =
{
{ type = "input-output", position = {0, 3} },
{ type = "input-output", position = {0, -3} }
},
production_type = "input-output",
filter = "steam",
minimum_temperature = 100.0
}

Thank you for bringing that option to my attention though. It's worth messing with, because the devs seem to have some strange ideas of what should be default behavior and what is reasonable sometimes.