Factorio Forums

I'm playing on the switch. My nuclear reactors are losing heat, why? If I need to put up more videos I can.

It seem like the turbine are poducing smoke ? If they produce electricity isn't that expected for reactor to transfer their heat and lose it in the process ?

If some reactor has lower temperature, for example because it was just built, or it had no fuel, and is still warming up, it pulls heat from the neighboring reactors and heat pipes. The same with heat pipes. If you just added a number of heat pipes, they need to heat up and are pulling heat from the neighboring heat connections including reactors.

Is it possible that reactors can lose heat if I don't have enough turbines?

Thanks for the information. But I had to many steam turbines. And it killed the heat coming from the reactors. Generally they operate around 900°C for the switch. But they were only getting to around 530°C. I removed the access turbines and boom, heat back up. Now I have to rearrange for a water upgrade.

Erf_Qwake wrote: ↑

Mon Jul 15, 2024 11:14 pm

Thanks for the information. But I had to many steam turbines. And it killed the heat coming from the reactors. Generally they operate around 900°C for the switch. But they were only getting to around 530°C. I removed the access turbines and boom, heat back up. Now I have to rearrange for a water upgrade.

Heat exchangers see varying temperatures not turbines, the turbines will only ever see 500°C steam with your setup.

Erf_Qwake wrote: ↑

Mon Jul 15, 2024 11:14 pm

Thanks for the information. But I had to many steam turbines. And it killed the heat coming from the reactors. Generally they operate around 900°C for the switch. But they were only getting to around 530°C. I removed the access turbines and boom, heat back up. Now I have to rearrange for a water upgrade.

If you are using the heat as fast as it is produced reactors will run in the 500-600C range with most setups. Seeing temps over 900 usually means you're wasting power.

Thanks I will look into it.

Yeah, if you have too many heat exchangers for a given number of reactors (should be 1 per every 10 MW of heat produced for all reactors in a given setup at maximum) then they will draw off excess heat and your reactors will cool down until the reach 500C. Then the heat exchangers will bottleneck on how much steam they can produce each.

If you have exactly enough heat exchangers to match power output, then the reactors will drop in temperature until the heat drawn from them matches the heat generated. At what temperature depends on the size of the setup and how far away the farthest heat exchanger is. But, so long as they are not too far away, you should always get full power out.

In general, if your turbines are near full power, so long as you power demand isn't spiking over your production capacity, then you are fine and you can ignore the temperature.