Blueprint Preview (Thanks /u/demodude4u for the amazing Blueprint Bot!):
Preview Image
It looks like everybody's got their own take on nuclear power, so here's mine. It's completely impractical for mid or even late game and belongs to those of us off the deep end with pet projects which demand several gigawatts of power. The premise here is that it has to scale infinitely. I was also adamant about not separating the steam generation from the steam consumption since the scale of these megafactories is already quite large and I wanted to compact the footprint as much as possible for the benefit that it brings (space is a resource). With that in mind, here's what it looks like in-game (I mentioned this was big right)?
In-Game Image
So it's really nothing you haven't seen before. You feed the reactors in the middle, they power the heat exchangers above and below them, and those heat exchangers send steam to the turbine farms above and below them. The key differences here are the horizontal scalability and the usage of barrels.
The ratios are NOT perfect (horror!), but they're as close as I could realistically get them without compromising the design. I wanted everything to fit in horizontally tilable columns that consumed the equivalent amount of energy to the reactors directly beneath them. I eventually settled on a 9-tile wide column design which produces 279.36 MW of power. 9 tiles worth of reactor is theoretically capable of outputting 288MW of energy, so this is a very healthy chunk of that (97% yield). Here's a close-up of the reactor layout and heat-exchanger portion of the column design:
Column Layout
As the astute observer may notice: There's a two tile gap between the pipelines coming out of the heat exchangers. There's actually a reason for this. Since I'm trying to fit so much power generation into such narrow columns those pipelines are running at very high throughput (~1450 steam per second). Testing showed that adding any extra pipes or turning them at the end to match with the inputs on the turbines caused a significant drop in throughput. By leaving this gap between the exchangers the pipes are able to line up perfectly with the inputs on the turbines (the turbines need one unit of space on both sides in order to fit). This maintains the throughput and allows all of the steam from the exchangers to be used. This also makes room for empty water barrel return lanes and energy accumulators, which are nice bonuses, but not essential to the design.
I'm quite proud of the water unbarrelling setup which I'm using here:
Unbarreling
This reactor uses over 200,000 water per second, so barrels are pretty much necessary (10,000 water per second per belt versus the ~1000 you get from a typical pipe). Since I wanted this thing to scale infinitely I needed to put the water inputs on the outside of the reactor to make room for an arbitrary number of belts. This means that I had to pump the water back past the steam turbines to the heat exchangers. Again, the two tiles that I bought by creating a gap between the heat exchangers came in handy here. Having one lane for power poles was also surprisingly necessary, because I had to use pumps the entire way.
Since the water and steam pipes have to have the same throughput (1 unit of water = 1 unit of steam), they both suffer from the same dropoff bottleneck. Every pipe which I added caused hundreds of units of fluid per second to disappear.
One neat thing which I've learned about pumps is that they don't suffer from any dropoff. Using a straight line of pumps will always preserve the throughput. It turns out I couldn't afford to even add a few underground pipes to make way for power poles in one of the existing rows of pumps. That's how down to the wire this design had to be in order to maintain efficiency!In the end, it did end up meeting the 20GW target goal while maintaining horizontal scalability:
Proof
Alas, there are no steam tanks in order to provide circuit control of the fuel cells. If somebody's got an alternative way to handle that, please let me know!
Edit: Fixed spoiler image tags
are all of them necessary?
