Nuclear power or steam power

[xFunnieuss]

as the title says, I am wondering if a steam power plant would be better then a nuclear power plant. The only reason im thinking about nuclear power is becauase how much space my steam power plant takes up compared to a nuclear power plant. The issue is to research nuclear power is very expensive and Im not sure the time invested into it would be a better payout over my current steam powerplant setup
if anyone has a better look into these 2 methods please post what one you think is better
thanks

[bobucles]

In general you won't need nuclear power to beat a normal game. In fact you won't need to touch uranium at all. Steam will take you all the way to the rocket. If you want to TRY nuclear power, start it now. It takes a lot of processing before you can even start up a nuclear reactor. It's a bit annoying that you can't start processing until after doing the expensive research.

Nuclear power doesn't shine until after the rocket, because bases start growing exponentially and power demand skyrockets with beacons. If you're running an extended game like marathon mode or death world then uranium is a great way to increase your military power. Nuclear ammo is super OP and a 2x2 nuclear setup will keep that first rocket base running no problem.

[Aeternus]

Steam power advantages:
- Cheap to set up, very basic research.
- Easy to expand if you plan ahead. A single pump can drive 20 boilers / 40 steamengines.
- Once you have oil you basically have an inexhaustable fuel source
Disadvantages:
- Heavy pollution
- Plant becomes quite large (needs a large water body) at higher power levels
- At very high power demands, belt speed can bottleneck fuel. Once you get to rocket fuel, this problem disappears until you start drawing >2GW.

Nuclear advantages:
- Extremely high energy generation
- No pollution (aside from the fuel processing and uranium mines)
- Fuel burn is so low that it's practically free power, especially if you make good use of the adjacency bonus
Disadvantages:
- Expensive research
- Complex to set up, requires a separate production chain
- Continuous fuel burn requires some combinator magic or you'll be wasting fuel
- Adjacency bonus means you won't get the full bang for the nuclear buck until you start fielding 6 reactors, which means nuclear only becomes seriously viablel once you start drawing around 1GW
- Producing U-235 via Kovarex loop takes a while to start and cook.

Megabases can definately use a nuclear facility for main power. A chemical plant would be hard pressed to deliver upwards of 5GW, but a nuclear facility can do that easily. Spacewise comparison: I have in my budding megabase an old chemical plant I've not broken down because I want to keep the oil refinery going - it burns rocket fuel now produced from the light oil - solid fuel - rocket fuel chain. It's roughly 850 MW.
I also have a nuclear plant, similar in size. At max burn it can currently produce 4 GW. While starting up the nuclear plant I used a small uranium patch I initially found. It was 570K in size. It is currently, dozens of hours at a draw of 2 to 3.5 GW (fluctuates when production ramps up after launching rockets, I'm still setting up a heavy production chain for research) still 295K in size. All of the uranium mined is going to fuel production though (a minor amount siphoned for nuclear fuel for my trains), I don't use nuclear weapons or uranium shells. But that should give you an idea of the energy density of nuclear fuel. If you get one decently sized field, you'll be golden for the rest of the game. But yea, nuclear is something that is optional and mainly for megabases. Not critical for quick "launch the rocket and done" games.

[impetus maximus]

Steam power advantages:
A single pump can drive 20 boilers / 40 steamengines.

or 3:46:92 (via 2 rows)

[mrvn]

If you want to go nuclear start doing so early. You want to start your first centrifuge way before you build the reactor and I wouldn't go nuclear unless you have researched and implemented the Kovarex process.

Note that you already get a neighbour bonus for 2 reactors, more for 4. 6 or 8 reactors are event better. The more you chain together in a 2*X setup the close you get to perfection. While you can build a single reactor setup I would start with at least 4 or 6. Build some extra heat pipes and lots of storage tanks for steam. Better to run 4 reactors 5% of the time than running one reactor 90% of the time.

In the current multiplayer marathon game I'm playing I've just build a 8 reactor setup. Total overkill at the moment but it's a nice tilable design in chunks of 4 reactors and I wanted to check the blueprint for adding the next 4 reactors works. The reason why we went nuclear is that we are short on coal, growing trees for power takes up a lot of space (and we are lucky we have greenhouses), solar needs even more space and we are surrounded by aliens that keep the laser turrets busy. Expanding needs more power to keep up the turret wall. Now we have it.

[vanatteveldt]

Steam power advantages:
A single pump can drive 20 boilers / 40 steamengines.

or 3:46:92 (via 2 rows)

I generally do 1 red belt of coal, 3 pumps, 60 boilers, 120 engines, for 108MW. This consumes 216 J/s of coal, or 27 coal/s, which is almost exactly what a red belt delivers (26.67). The first 2*20 boilers are directly hooked up to the pumps, and I weave one pipe under the inserters to get to the last 20 boilers. I guess I could have tried hooking them all up directly, didn't test whether the fluid throughput is high enough.

Of course, a single yellow belt of rocket fuel can feed a scary amount of boilers, but I tend to stick to coal before transitioning to nuke power.

Reason for nuke is that a >1GW plant is trivial for nuke, but a scary amount of boilers (and a ridiculous amount of solar.

(note that eff1 modules in your miners might be the most efficient way to 'produce' energy in terms of MW/resource initial cost and is free after...)

[Aeternus]

Fluid throughput can survive a pipe or three. I generally try to hook the pump up via one underground pipe to the first boiler, which allows me to belt in coal or other fuel from between the boiler and water. That way it's easy to extend an early power plant. Once I get petrochemical going I usually build a completely new plant somewhere near the refinery to make use of the solid fuel production, then break down the old one and use those parts to further build up the main steam plant. I try to switch away from burning coal as soon as I can since you'll need gobs of coal for plastic production, and some for grenades for military science production. If you don't have much coal, you may end up short on it for plastics, which means no advanced circuits, which means no blue research...
I go for the 1/20/40 setup (eventually, I generally do 1/4/8 mirrored initially and then extend that outward as my power needs increase)

And yea, a blue belt of rocket fuel, compressed, if you can sustain that kind of flow... equates to 9GW of energy continuous, allowing for 4.5GW of power generation. A yellow belt runs at 1/3rd the speed, so can provide 1.5 GW of power generation from a yellow belt only. For Solid Fuel (early on), just divide by 5. Red belt of Solid Fuel allows for 600MW of electrical power generation, which should more then suffice for midgame.

[JimBarracus]

Hard to say what is better.

Depends on the fuel availability.
Nuclear is more complex but once you understood the concept it is quite easy.

A good solution for free energy is turning oil from unused oil wells, convert it to solid fuel and burn it.
Only setup costs, no running costs. You should scale it that it runs with depleeted oil sources.

[mrvn]

One thing to consider:

- If you don't burn coal for steam engines then what do you use it for? furnaces, plastic, ...
- If you don't burn wood ... furnaces
- solid fuel ... make other oil products instead, rocket fuel, train fuel
- If you don't use uranium in nuclear reactors then what do you use it for? NUKES, NUKES, NUKES, nuclear fuel

So it becomes a question of supply and demand and every map is different.

[BlakeMW]

Don't wait for enrichment before using nuclear power. The only reason to use enrichment is because you want to make nuclear bombs or eliminate the need to shotgun U-238 stockpiles, reactors consume U-235 only very slowly.

It's important to exploit the adjacency bonus though for power density and stuff, 2 reactors generate 160MW (80MW/Reactor) and 4 reactors generates 480MW (120MW/Reactor), so you're actually getting a lot of the adjacency bonus by 2 reactors and I consider it a good starting point. I wouldn't really bother with nuclear before you need 100MW+ and can justify a 2x Reactor setup.

Whether or not to go fuel-saving is another choice. It's not that hard and is cheap to implement, a 160MW reactor can actually store an entire fuel cycle's worth of heat just in the reactors, heat pipes and heat exchangers, so you only need a storage tank to detect when the heat exchangers stop producing steam, so as an enhancement to a non-saver, a fuel-saving setup only adds 1 tank and about 2 combinators. Even "infinite" setups (producing more than 80MW/reactor) can store around 70% of a fuel cycle in the heat pipes etc so as long as the baseline load is > 30% you don't need any steam storage at all except to detect steam depletion, as such fuel savers can almost exactly the same power density as non-fuel savers. Don't bother with large batteries of steam tanks, that's totally pointless.

Fuelsaving isn't essential and really the only reason to do it is to help build up the stockpile of U235 for enrichment because once you have enrichment you have zero incentive to save fuel. The way to understand this is the iron ore in a given area will be consumed long before the uranium ore. You don't need to conserve uranium ore. The same is true of coal too though, it's up to you whether you leave coal, uranium or both on the ground in the aftermath of iron ore extraction.

The summary: Get a nuclear reactor once your power demands can justify it. Don't bother waiting for enrichment, it's only for mass-producing nukes. You can turn your reactors into fuel-savers if you want to save up U235 for enrichment faster, but once you have enrichment it's pointless because then U235 is not scarce in any way whatsoever.

[mrvn]

Do wait for enrichment.

You get very few uranium 235 from mining and you need 40 uranium 235 to boostrap the Kovarex process. So you want to refine a lot of uranium ore and save all the uranium 235 you get up to 40 at least. With the low yield that will take a lot of time. I try to tune that to take about as long as researching Kovarex. Meaning if research pulls ahead I add more centrifuges to keep up.

If you manage to get more than 40 uranium 235 before Kovarex then go ahead and start nuclear power. But I would never start nuclear before that. And building 20 centrifuges to get the initial uranium 235 quickly just means you end up with 18 useless centrifuges (till you get nukes which can use a few extra centrifuges). 2 are enough to run a normal reactor. 3-4 are overkill but you might want to stockpile some uranium 235 for nukes already.

If you use centrifuges to stockpile uranium 235 then use circuit connections to not use up all the uranium 238. Iirc fuel cells need a 1:20 ratio. Can't remember what nukes need. Would be stupid to run out of uranium 238 because you painstakingly converted it all.

[Aeternus]

Don't wait for enrichment before using nuclear power. The only reason to use enrichment is because you want to make nuclear bombs or eliminate the need to shotgun U-238 stockpiles, reactors consume U-235 only very slowly.

I disagree. It takes a LOT of U-235 to start the Kovarex loop, and the sooner it is going, the sooner it is self-sustaining. You generate on average 7 U-235 per 1000 U-238. If you intend to use nuclear only for fuel, you'll have such a crapton of U-238 that it will fill more then a full chest before you have enough to even start the Kovarex loop and get rid of all that excess U-238. If you make Uranium bullets then you'll want that kind of surplus though.

It's important to exploit the adjacency bonus though for power density and stuff, 2 reactors generate 160MW (80MW/Reactor) and 4 reactors generates 480MW (120MW/Reactor), so you're actually getting a lot of the adjacency bonus by 2 reactors and I consider it a good starting point. I wouldn't really bother with nuclear before you need 100MW+ and can justify a 2x Reactor setup.

I'd go so far as to say that it only becomes useful past 500MW - before then a large boiler/steam engine plant can easily handle things. I've broken my preferred nuclear plant setup down in 3 sections:
1: The initial reactor pair plus controls (fuel insertion only when needed, hold if no fuel and/or depleted fuelrod not able to be dropped off).
2: Expansion cluster: 4 reactors chained to 28 heat exchangers (560MW max power generation).
3: A cluster of storage tanks, pumps and turbines that can convert that steam into power and store the surplus generated from a reactor fuel burst.
Typically you want such a setup at least at 50% load before you plop it down.

Whether or not to go fuel-saving is another choice. It's not that hard and is cheap to implement, a 160MW reactor can actually store an entire fuel cycle's worth of heat just in the reactors, heat pipes and heat exchangers, so you only need a storage tank to detect when the heat exchangers stop producing steam, so as an enhancement to a non-saver, a fuel-saving setup only adds 1 tank and about 2 combinators. Even "infinite" setups (producing more than 80MW/reactor) can store around 70% of a fuel cycle in the heat pipes etc so as long as the baseline load is > 30% you don't need any steam storage at all except to detect steam depletion, as such fuel savers can almost exactly the same power density as non-fuel savers. Don't bother with large batteries of steam tanks, that's totally pointless.

Uh. No. in "infinite" setups you approach an energy production of 160MW per reactor across a 200 second burst. This equates to 32GJ of energy produced per reactor over 200 seconds. Each reactor can store 5GJ of energy before reaching max temp, so you got to dissipate 27GJ over 200 seconds for each reactor fueled. You will definately need steam tanks. I recommend at least 4 per reactor, and forcefeed them by pumps to keep the steam flowing through and keep the exchangers producing. One advantage through is that energy transfer between reactors is almost instantaneous - so you can treat a reactor cluster as a single heat source. You don't need heatpipes leading away from each reactor.

Fuelsaving isn't essential and really the only reason to do it is to help build up the stockpile of U235 for enrichment because once you have enrichment you have zero incentive to save fuel. The way to understand this is the iron ore in a given area will be consumed long before the uranium ore. You don't need to conserve uranium ore. The same is true of coal too though, it's up to you whether you leave coal, uranium or both on the ground in the aftermath of iron ore extraction.

Again, I disagree. Without fuelsaving, especially in large plants, you're needlessly burning a crapton of fuel. Throttled, a reactor burns so slow that a single patch of Uranium, even small, will power a megabase for days of actual playtime.

[mrvn]

Especially when you convert your 100MW steam engine plant to a 4-8 reactor setup. The neighbour bonus makes building a single reactor setup uneconomical. Even 2 is wasteful. You want the neighbour bonus but then you want to run it just enough to produce 100MW average and that means long downtimes and fuel saving. Running 4-8 reactors full throttle when you only need one would waste 4-8 times the fuel. Running it right saves you 75% of the fuel.

So overall starting with a 4 reactor setup without fuel saving wastes 16 times the fuel.

[Frightning]

The three power generation methods basically compare as follows:

Steam:
-Lowest tech
-Highest fuel consumption
-Highest pollution
-Medium space efficiency
Solar:
-Medium tech
-No fuel consumption
-No pollution
-Lowest space efficiency (by far)
Nuclear:
-Highest tech
-Low fuel consumption
-Low pollution
-Highest space efficiency

Of secondary note:
Steam is pretty much mandatory at the start, but you can totally 'go the distance' and even run a megabase off of steam power if you so choose. The relative availability of material resources can make certain power generation methods more desirable than others on a given map. To that end, here is what I would consider a good indication that a given power method is worthwhile on a given map:

Steam:
-Plenty of Coal and/or Oil
-Source of Water
Solar:
-Plenty of Iron and Copper
Nuclear:
-Plenty of Uranium ore
-Source of Water

Obviously, some maps may be rich enough resources that several or even all of those options are worthwhile. Moreover, even when all of them are, you may consider land area to be valuable or not depending on biter settings and amount of water on the map.

[BlakeMW]

Don't wait for enrichment.

In the new version you don't get starting patch uranium anyway, which makes it a moot point whether or not the starting patch might provide enough U-235 to get enrichment (it usually wouldn't).

A reactor can be run full-time by 1 centrifuge, you should use prod3 modules at least to make the fuel cells so it's actually 1.4 reactors per centrifuge, but anyway.

So if you start with a 2x Reactor setup and you need 2x Centrifuge to feed it full time. This will never save up enough U-235 to get enrichment (unless it's a fuel-saver...)

Now lets say you run 4 Centrifuges instead, if you didn't run the reactor, you'll save up enough U-235 in half the time.

But this is factorio, so you should get like 10 Centrifuges (what are we, mice or men?), now running the reactor makes a trifling difference in the time required to save up for enrichment. Logically you can just separate out the centrifuges for power vs the centrigues for saving up for enrichment, like if you build 4 centrifuges to save up for enrichment, is it so hard to build 2 more to run a powerplant now? Centrifuges are kind of expensive, but not compared with a Nuclear Reactor.

The other thing, and this is important, waiting for enrichment DOES NOT increase the total amount of U-235 you get from an ore patch, assuming you stockpile the U-238 rather than shotgun it, it's still available to be converted to U-235 later. So the only "good" argument is if your only uranium ore patch for some reason happens to have enough ore to produce say 50 U-235, but not 35 (making enrichment impossible) or 100 (making it easy to run nuclear and save for enrichment). Statistically, it isn't terribly likely that it'll be so finely balanced, I normally see as many 500K or 1.3M uranium patches as piddly patches. (incidentally, the break even is 57k, less than this and you can't save up anyway and will have to go look for a bigger patch)

I guess there is one legit reason to delay starting nuclear power until after enrichment: because you want to start using Nuclear Bombs ASAP. Nuclear Reactors are easy to use without enrichment: you just need 1 centrifuge per reactor (or 1.4 reactors if using Prod modules to make fuel cells). But Nuclear Bombs require so much U-235 that you can't realistically make them without enrichment so it's basically a pre-requisite for nuclear bombs. So if you're beelining (speedrunning?) nuclear bombs you would just horde your U-235, although it's still the same: if you make 20 centrifuges to save up for and later run a massive nuclear bomb program, making a few more to run reactors probably isn't going to be a big deal.

[vanatteveldt]

Good points.

The way it usually goes for me is transition through 3 power plants: a smallish coal plant at the starting site; a bigger coal plant at a convenient coal patch somewhere; and a nuclear plant if/when I need to go into "megabase" mode (ie >> 1GW).

I usually start mining and processing U well before needing nuclear power, so with a bit of luck I will have >>40 U235 lying around by that time. So, I don't wait until enrichment for the sake of saving U235, but it just generally works out that way...

If your starting coal patch is decent enough, you could maybe skip step 2 and directly transition into nuclear, but that means rushing towards nuclear quicker than I usually do. It might be a good option on deathworlds, though, to have less pollution and quicker access to uranium bullets and nukes.

[nosports]

i use Solar energy, because if have much space freely available.

Also for the rocket/satellites (among other) i need akkus and solar-panels, so i set up a production, which is nearly continous and the overflow of the satellite-production is stored.
From time to time, or if needed i stamp additional solar/akku fields......
So energy is plenty in my map with solar

On the other hand i have a 4 centrifuges & 4 Kovarex-Enrichments in place which produce the Uranium.
Also sitting in a box is a full 2x2 reactor setup with all needed.

To date i use the Uranium only for the Atomic missle.......

I guess i depends on which you prefer, have available.......

[Zanthra]

As for saving for enrichment vs starting reactors quickly, it comes down to what your goals are. You get about 7 U-235 for every 10,000 uranium ore. Each U-235 will produce 10 fuel cells, each runs a reactor for 200 seconds, for a total of a little more than half an hour of reactor time. Even with these low probabilities, Uranium ore still works out, with a single reactor and no enrichment, to be about 56 MJ per unit. The big issue is the leading buffers. If you use a belt to take the U-235 to the fuel cell factory, then have a belt taking the fuel cells to the reactors, you don’t want to let the U-235 back up on the belt. It would be best to put 4 to 10 U-235 into fuel construction manually, then direct the rest to saving for enrichment. The programmable speaker can be used to alert you to manually move a few U-235 from enrichment to fuel before the enrichment overflows as the centrifuges will stock a lot of U-235 for the next kovarex cycle. You can of course set up complex circuit conditions and latches to control the buffers, but because of the times involved, manual movement of some U-235 is usually quite reasonable.

[bobucles]

If you're serious about nuclear weapons and power, get Kovarex started asap. It takes 45 minutes before the 40 U-235 catalyst pays for itself. This time can be dramatically reduced with speed modules and beacons. A +100% speed centrifuge will pay off in about 22 minutes, and going 8 beacon +centrifuge speed3s will bring the payoff time down to about 7.5 minutes. Every time the payoff happens you can double the build, so a process that normally takes hours to ramp up can be full speed in just an hour thanks to speed modules.

I never tried running anything less than a 2x2 nuclear reactor fueled by ovarex, but I heard that a small number of reactors can be powered fairly reliably without any Kovarex. If you go this route be sure to place high level productivity modules in your fuel assembler. Getting up to +40% FREE fuel is an amazing thing.

Fuel reprocessing is a pretty disappointing research so don't worry about rushing it. In fact it's a good idea to keep a stockpile of dead reactor cells because they are very helpful in building a smart reactor.

Smart reactors 101:
The basic idea of a smart reactor is to turn on when you need it and stay off when you don't. You don't want to suffer any energy shortage and you don't want to waste excess heat at 1000C. You can do this with circuits.

It's very tricky to tell inserters to ADD fuel to the reactor. Using the inserters requires a sustained command signal (more effort) and it the command will fail if there is no fuel to immediately grab. This makes an insertion based Smart Reactor very difficult to do. Don't try building a reactor this way.

The trick for a smart reactor is that you can STALL the reactor. Fill it up with 50 dead fuel cells, burn 1 extra cell, and it won't be able to burn any more. It'll be forced to wait because the output is clogged, keeping the reactor off line. To turn the reactor back on simply extract a dead cell to unclog the output and turn it back on. Extraction is MUCH easier than insertion because you only need to send a 1 frame pulse to the inserter. No tricky timings, just set the condition and let it rip. An extraction-themed smart reactor can always keep fresh fuel ready to go, making the process super reliable even if your belts struggle to stay saturated with fuel.

There is no way to directly communicate with a nuclear system. The reactor core can not be wired and neither can any other component. What CAN be wired is a storage tank. The trick is to generate steam, store it in at least one tank, and read that signal for your control. When the reactor goes off line, the steam generation will slowly get weaker until the storage tank starts getting tapped. When that happens you trigger the reactors to turn back online. There is some lag time at every step of the process because reactors are slow to heat up and slow to cool down. Make sure you catch the steam shortage early and overpower the reactor to catch back up.

A two stage smart reactor will never need more than one steam storage tank (place it towards the COLD end of your reactor!) for the sensor and may struggle to even get above 700C. If the steam starts going down it sets the first stage, which turns some of the reactors online. If the steam gets critically low it trips the second stage, turning ALL the reactors to go online (the first stage reactors get hit twice!). As the steam level gets restored the stages reset. If the steam level stays low, you need to monitor and keep extracting dead cells every 200 sec or it will stall. Anything beyond a 2 stage reactor is overkill. The reason is that no matter how big your nuclear system gets, it doesn't matter if the power demand immediately stops. Half of the reactors will never be able to overheat the entire system in one shot.

You don't actually have to set up a smart reactor to have a successful nuclear system. Think of it as a side project to challenge yourself.

[Aeternus]

Smart reactors 101:
The basic idea of a smart reactor is to turn on when you need it and stay off when you don't. You don't want to suffer any energy shortage and you don't want to waste excess heat at 1000C. You can do this with circuits.

It's very tricky to tell inserters to ADD fuel to the reactor. Using the inserters requires a sustained command signal (more effort) and it the command will fail if there is no fuel to immediately grab. This makes an insertion based Smart Reactor very difficult to do. Don't try building a reactor this way.

Incorrect. You can feed from a belt - if there is no fuel on the feeding belt or chest (which can be detected with circuit signal) you can hold off fuel feeding across your entire reactor cluster until all of the fuel feeders are ready. Then simply activate all of the inserters at once (set to override stack, insert one fuel only) and use the slow basic inserters. You can detect fuel being on the inserters hand and use that as a signal to prevent more fuel from being inserted until the reactors are ready for the next burn cycle, which should happen when:
- Steam buffer below set treshold.
- Reactor has ejected a spent fuel cell (also detect this from the ejection inserter).
- Fuel is ready
- Spent fuel belt or chests are empty.

The trick for a smart reactor is that you can STALL the reactor. Fill it up with 50 dead fuel cells, burn 1 extra cell, and it won't be able to burn any more. It'll be forced to wait because the output is clogged, keeping the reactor off line. To turn the reactor back on simply extract a dead cell to unclog the output and turn it back on. Extraction is MUCH easier than insertion because you only need to send a 1 frame pulse to the inserter. No tricky timings, just set the condition and let it rip. An extraction-themed smart reactor can always keep fresh fuel ready to go, making the process super reliable even if your belts struggle to stay saturated with fuel.

These kinds of reactors are a pain in the neck to expand since freshly placed ones don't come with 50 spent fuel. Also, if one of the reactors de-syncs for any reason you're going to have an out-of-sync fuel burn. It works, it's just... more complex then the latch-based insertion ones. And more can go wrong.

There is no way to directly communicate with a nuclear system. The reactor core can not be wired and neither can any other component. What CAN be wired is a storage tank. The trick is to generate steam, store it in at least one tank, and read that signal for your control. When the reactor goes off line, the steam generation will slowly get weaker until the storage tank starts getting tapped. When that happens you trigger the reactors to turn back online. There is some lag time at every step of the process because reactors are slow to heat up and slow to cool down. Make sure you catch the steam shortage early and overpower the reactor to catch back up.

Yea, I'd definately use three rows of tanks, force fed by pump and force feeding the generators by pumps too. Then set the "trigger reactor" level at 10K steam. This gives you roughly 7GJ of storage in the tanks, and 5GJ in the reactor itself (compared to the reactors, heat storage in the heatpipes and exchangers is insignificant - especially considering their temps will always be lower, so their full capacity cannot be used)

A two stage smart reactor will never need more than one steam storage tank (place it towards the COLD end of your reactor!) for the sensor and may struggle to even get above 700C. If the steam starts going down it sets the first stage, which turns some of the reactors online. If the steam gets critically low it trips the second stage, turning ALL the reactors to go online (the first stage reactors get hit twice!). As the steam level gets restored the stages reset. If the steam level stays low, you need to monitor and keep extracting dead cells every 200 sec or it will stall. Anything beyond a 2 stage reactor is overkill. The reason is that no matter how big your nuclear system gets, it doesn't matter if the power demand immediately stops. Half of the reactors will never be able to overheat the entire system in one shot.

You're promoting an uneven burn? That's... wasteful. Turn all on/off simultaneously to get a maximum payout from the neigbour bonus, and make sure your reactor either can buffer all energy it produces, or your plant has a high enough draw to dissipate enough energy.
See viewtopic.php?f=208&t=48150 for an older design of mine - the controls are still viable, the water delivery method sadly needed some work after the barrels got hit with the nerfbat.