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Nucular

Description: Adds nuclear power plants, atomic bombs and particle science.
Latest Release: v1.0.3, August 20, 2016
Factorio Version: 0.13
License: MIT License
Download: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Simdezimon/Nucular

This mod adds nuclear reactors to generate power in mid- and late-game. Uranium processiong can be researched after sulfur processing, so it is possible to build a nuclear reactor before solar panels. Later technologies like breeder reactors allow you to extend your uranium supply.
On the military side the mod adds uranium ammunition and nuclear weapons to deal with biters.
If you want to play peaceful, you can use plutonium to create alien science packs.
https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Simdezimon/Nucular

Great mod, works as intended, as far as my testing went.
Beautiful textures on the icons and sprites, they visually adapt well to the vanilla ones.

Some minor things:
- The "uranium"-tab in the inventory should be capitalized to "Uranium"
- Same goes for "uranium enrichment"

Keep up the good work!

I like this mod a lot. I'm probably going to run with this mod active all the time.

The cost of the nuclear plant seems a little high (200 steel, 300 concrete, 50 advanced circuits). The 5 steel cost for the fuel rods also seems very high, particularly when you use the fast breeder. Maybe if you could recover some via reprocessing?

Beware of math below. Numbers do not include energy consumed by the facilities in processing.

1)[Without any reprocessing]

50 uranium ore + 10 S.Acid + 5 steel -> ~800MJ + 40 depleted uranium + 1 used fuel
or
50 uranium ore + 27 iron + 15 petroleum -> ~800MJ +40 depleted uranium + 1 used fuel

This gives ~16MJ/uranium ore or ~14.125MJ/uranium ore if we subtract the opportunity cost of turning the petroleum into fuel cubes and burning it in a boiler.

2[With reprocessing, but not fast breeding]

We get two new equations
1 used fuel -> 8 uranium + 1 plutonium
5 plutonium + 8 uranium + 5 steel -> 1 fuel
(Effectively these give: 4 plutonium + 5 steel -> ~800MJ)

With some math:

0.84(50 uranium ore + 10 S.acid) + 6.25 steel -> ~1000MJ + 40 depleted uranium
42 uranium ore + 32.93 iron + 12.6 petroleum > ~1000MJ + 40 depleted uranium

This gives ~23.8MJ/uranium ore, or ~21.9MJ/ore accounting for the lost petroleum.

3[With reprocessing and fast breeding]

1 fuel + 20 depleted uranium -> 1 used fuel + 20 plutonium
assuming we use the plutonium to fuel the reaction itself:

20 depleted uranium + 5 steel -> 16 plutonium
therefore
20 depleted uranium + 25 steel -> ~3200MJ

Adding this to the overall equation:

0.84(50 uranium ore + 10 S.acid) + 56.25 steel -> ~7400MJ
42 uranium ore + 282.93 iron + 12.6 petroleum -> ~7400MJ

This is ~176MJ/uranium ore. At this point you aren't burning uranium though, you are burning iron. You are getting ~26.15MJ/iron ore


4[Real world numbers, taken from Wikipedia, just for fun]

Reality isn't balanced of course:

Uranium in fast breeder: 80,620,000 MJ/kg
Coal in a boiler: 24-35 MJ/kg

Thanks for the replies.

Erasmus wrote:The cost of the nuclear plant seems a little high (200 steel, 300 concrete, 50 advanced circuits).

One reactor can replace ~200 solar panels and 160 accumulators, so you only need one-fifth of the resources with the nuclear plant.
Solar power is already a bit overpowered, so I think that is a good middle ground.

Erasmus wrote:This is ~176MJ/uranium ore. At this point you aren't burning uranium though, you are burning iron. You are getting ~26.15MJ/iron ore

Good point, I hadn't thought about the iron consumption while balancing the mod and our main concern should be uranium and not iron ore. For the next version I might change the recipe from 5 steel bars to 1 or 2 steel bars per fuel.

One reactor can replace ~200 solar panels and 160 accumulators, so you only need one-fifth of the resources with the nuclear plant.
Solar power is already a bit overpowered, so I think that is a good middle ground.

Yeah, that is true. I may have just been over enthusiastic In my first run through with the mod and tried to set up the plant before I was really ready. The significant cost was the 50 advanced circuits, which is not unreasonable. It did mean I had to have oil up and running well though.

Does uranium how up in your world spawn even though its not showing up in world gen options?Or am I missing something here?

Hey, is the modder active here? I tried this mod and I noticed some issues with it.

First of all the skin seems to be upsite down now, the input and output sides seem to have changed: inputs and outputs: http://i.imgur.com/paJ03ji.png skin: http://i.imgur.com/sOt1X1I.png

Then, the Turbine says it can handle 4.1 MW, but it only runs with 3.7 with one reactor. I tried to build it like your screenshot up there, but when I build 2 turbines per reactor the turbines stop working completely: http://i.imgur.com/1HKx9dj.png

Since the reactor needs power that thing doesnt even work properly, if you don't have enough power. You are in a constant loop of getting less and less power because, if you don't have enough, the turbine works slower as well. Because of this I made a small energy network just for the reactors.

The reactor seems not to care what temperature the input water has. The turbine works just as fast with 15 degrees as it does with 30. I build a boiler in front of it, but the turbine works faster if I build the boiler after the reactor.

the power usage of this thing looks very weird: http://i.imgur.com/A41twct.png

edit: all these issues go away if you spin the reactor before placing it.

Shouldn't the fast breeder output hot water? If so, it doesnt work for some reason.

aTeLe wrote:Shouldn't the fast breeder output hot water? If so, it doesnt work for some reason.

The fast breeder would stop working if it can't get rid of the hot water. And with enough solar power steam engines don't remove the water.
So the breeder reactor doesn't produce hot water, the next version will show this more clearly.

Simdezimon wrote:

aTeLe wrote:Shouldn't the fast breeder output hot water? If so, it doesnt work for some reason.

The fast breeder would stop working if it can't get rid of the hot water. And with enough solar power steam engines don't remove the water.
So the breeder reactor doesn't produce hot water, the next version will show this more clearly.

Ah, I understand. Hmm, I don't know if this is the best way of doing it, I think, since you still use up the fuel which I primarily wanted to use to produce energy. But I guess it's not a big problem since it indirectly produces fuel for you out of depleted Uranium.

So I guess it's fine.

I'm playing with Nucular, and it's fun though very underwhelming compared with coal considering the extreme cheapness of coal and ease of setting up coal generation. I'm wondering at the output = enough to power 16 steam engines, why not go for nice round numbers and just make it output enough water to 20 steam engines, which also matches the output of 2 offshore pumps. This would allow cleanly replacing a 2/28 coal fired boiler string with a 2/1 fission reactor. Also, since pollution is one of the least relevant downsides of energy generation (boilers don't actually produce that much and eff modules can make the pollution of coal mining nearly go away) and low pollution is about the only thing uranium power has going for it a bit of extra performance from each reactor wouldn't hurt.

Version 0.2.0 is out, and with this version I have also added steam.
Since pipes transport 120 units of liquid per second, they can only transport 10.2 MW of power. Next I want to add a fusion reactor and that reactor would need three or more separate pipes, just for the heated water.
Another thing is steam cracking. Since having reactors only for power production is kind of boring (especially with solar power) I thought of some other uses for the steam. Steam cracking would need ~12MJ (One solid fuel in a boiler produces that) to crack 10 crude oil into petroleum gas. I have made a poll if you like this idea.

Since steam always contains 1MW of energy, 11 times more than heated water, it can be used in recipes as additional power source. Also one pipe is now can transport 120MW steampower. That should be enough for a fusion plant.

I am searching for more use cases for steam. If you know one, please let me know.

I like the steam, but I have to vote "no" for using steam in advanced oil processing. The reason is steam reforming only requires heat, and heat is easy to create by burning some of the produced gas which is already on-site. Do you know of any real world example where nuclear power is actually used for oil processing?

It might make sense to use the nuclear reactor for synthetic gas production though, for example coal gasification.

Thanks for the mod.

Simdezimon wrote:Version 0.2.0 is out, and with this version I have also added steam.
Since pipes transport 120 units of liquid per second, they can only transport 10.2 MW of power. Next I want to add a fusion reactor and that reactor would need three or more separate pipes, just for the heated water.
Another thing is steam cracking. Since having reactors only for power production is kind of boring (especially with solar power) I thought of some other uses for the steam. Steam cracking would need ~12MJ (One solid fuel in a boiler produces that) to crack 10 crude oil into petroleum gas. I have made a poll if you like this idea.

Since steam always contains 1MW of energy, 11 times more than heated water, it can be used in recipes as additional power source. Also one pipe is now can transport 120MW steampower. That should be enough for a fusion plant.

I am searching for more use cases for steam. If you know one, please let me know.

Very nice idea, to have the alternative way to use the uranium.

BlakeMW wrote:I like the steam, but I have to vote "no" for using steam in advanced oil processing. The reason is steam reforming only requires heat, and heat is easy to create by burning some of the produced gas which is already on-site. Do you know of any real world example where nuclear power is actually used for oil processing?

It might make sense to use the nuclear reactor for synthetic gas production though, for example coal gasification.

But Factorio is about a furter technologys. As for me, it is a nice things, to make atomic power a bit more useful. But need be carefuly with balanced of these things.

Here is a screenshot of my 200MW Nucular Power Plant. This is my first bots-based nuclear power plant, my previous ones used belts.


This factory consumes about 220MW, there is 40MW of solar generation but otherwise the Nuclear reactors provide all the power. Also visible is 40MW of backup power - an Oil Boiler and 12 Diesel Generators from KSPower. As I often do, I overbuild on Steam Turbines, having 20-50% extra steam turbines with storage tanks to better handle load spikes and make better use of reactors during lulls in electricity usage. A side effect of the 1000degrees steam is that storage tanks become much more effective too (tho I don't really use that). The volume of steam in the tank is fed into the circuit network and used as a condition to trigger the backup power, if the nuclear reactors are able to provide all required power to run the factory the tank will remain at 2500/2500. The oil burner comes on when the tank volume is less than 2300, it is a topping power plant, the Diesel Generators come on if the tank volume is less than 250 - that's for a real emergency when the power grid has been massively overtaxed for some time and/or the nuclear reactors are about to fail.

The setup appears to generate about as much nuclear fuel as it needs, it really should have more Uranium Enrichment but I wanted to focus more on the MOX fuel, hence the 13 Fast Breeders (they seem to work well, but don't even dent the depleted uranium stash, I have 20K of uranium and depleted uranium stashed away.

Finally I've killed myself several times with the Nuclear Rocket. Fighting trees. Even though I respect its lethality I do wish it'd deal ~6000 damage so it could kill Behemoth Biters.

btw, Very high temperature reactor The high temperatures enable applications such as process heat or hydrogen production via the thermochemical sulfur–iodine cycle

+ coal liqifications = oil productions.



ps: russian translations(ru):

There's a process which uses steam and methane to produce hydrogen and carbon dioxide. You could use this as a step for going to fusion power.

On request added support for Nucular Mod to my Angels Ores viewtopic.php?f=93&t=21909&p=147974#p147553

Just fixed a conflict between this Nucular_0.2.0 and MAIN-DyTech-Power_1.1.5 where (upon creating entity nuclear-reactor) Dytech's control.lua was trying to manipulate Nucular's reactor due to an entity name in both being nuclear-reactor. I did a find and replace and turned every instance of nuclear-reactor" in Nucular to nuclear-reactorNUCULAR". The single quote was so the replace ignored strings related to picture files. This fixed the crash.

I know this is not your fault, and if you could prefix or suffix the nuclear-reactor instances with something like your initials it would surely increase compatibility with any other nuclear mods. I imagine if all mod developers used a unique suffix naming convention there would be a lot less issues all around. I love the mod you've created, and I'll perform this operation on every update you post, but I'd rather not.

The uranium rounds magazine should probably do piercing damage considering it is using a heavy element like uranium, plus it would match the uranium cannon shell in doing piercing damage.