The perfect OCD compliant nuclear power plant! --- Now v2.4!

Power Plants, Energy Storage and Reliable Energy Supply. All about efficient energy production. Turning parts of your factory off. Reliable and self-repairing energy.
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bushbaby1234
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Re: The perfect OCD compliant nuclear power plant! --- Now v2.4!

Post by bushbaby1234 »

is the Steam->F value how much steam is stored before it turns on? if so the 2 reactor setup doesn't have storage for 1M steam that its set to by default (V2.4)

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Re: The perfect OCD compliant nuclear power plant! --- Now v2.4!

Post by Distelzombie »

bushbaby1234 wrote:is the Steam->F value how much steam is stored before it turns on? if so the 2 reactor setup doesn't have storage for 1M steam that its set to by default (V2.4)
It is always on until stored steam reaches the F value. Thats probably why I didnt see this in testing. :oops:
Thank you for mentioning!
I'll change this soon. (Just not now :D) I'll probably give much more attention to this value which means more testing.
Complete 2-Lane system as a Blueprint-Book! The perfect OCD reactor? Testing chained science lab efficiency Please use real prefixes and proper rounding!

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Re: The perfect OCD compliant nuclear power plant! --- Now v2.4!

Post by bushbaby1234 »

YAY i helped. what would be a good value to set it to? or better yet how much steam can a reactor(value:1) produce from a single fuel?

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Re: The perfect OCD compliant nuclear power plant! --- Now v2.4!

Post by Distelzombie »

bushbaby1234 wrote:YAY i helped. what would be a good value to set it to? or better yet how much steam can a reactor(value:1) produce from a single fuel?
I have to test. A low value causes brownouts and a high value COULD waste energy if storage gets full. (Did no testing up to now though. Later today)
Those two reactors produce 329,897 steam per run. (In this case virtually 4 fuel cells.) It fills 14 storage tanks.

Luckily we have a guy named Dimanper who conveniently did all the calculations! Thanks to him, like a million times! :D
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=44778&p=269934&hili ... io#p269934
Complete 2-Lane system as a Blueprint-Book! The perfect OCD reactor? Testing chained science lab efficiency Please use real prefixes and proper rounding!

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Re: The perfect OCD compliant nuclear power plant! --- Now v2.4!

Post by bushbaby1234 »

Holy crap that's fantastic

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Re: The perfect OCD compliant nuclear power plant! --- Now v2.4!

Post by MBas »

I really dont get why so many people still uses so many combinator logic for simply fuel input... :)
reactor.png
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Re: The perfect OCD compliant nuclear power plant! --- Now v2.4!

Post by Distelzombie »

All combinators, except one, are for different things than fuel input. And the one is necessary.
Complete 2-Lane system as a Blueprint-Book! The perfect OCD reactor? Testing chained science lab efficiency Please use real prefixes and proper rounding!

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Re: The perfect OCD compliant nuclear power plant! --- Now v2.4!

Post by damehex »

Just loaded up after the 0.15.22 update, and the update seems to have broken the reactor's loading logic. Maybe because of:
"Inserters will no longer drop what they are holding when disabled by the circuit network."

Hope it's an easy repair. Love this design! It is the only thing I use in my base that anyone else made.

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Re: The perfect OCD compliant nuclear power plant! --- Now v2.4!

Post by BabelFish »

A short term fix is to replace the decider combinators next to the fuel inserters.

Have the inserters handling the uranium fuel cells read their contents, EDIT: Set them to hold instead of pulse
Have the combinators read for uranium fuel cells and output a constant 1 spent fuel cell
using the green circut that's already connecting the two inserters for each reactor, connect one combinator to each pair of inserters.
connect both sides of the combinator together.

Image

I'm sure there's a better way than this, you lose a bunch of the alerts, but it will get you up and running again.
Last edited by BabelFish on Thu Jun 22, 2017 9:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: The perfect OCD compliant nuclear power plant! --- Now v2.4!

Post by ElPresidente »

Factorio 0.15.22 released

Changes:
Inserters will no longer drop what they are holding when disabled by the circuit network.

I think this breaks the fuel loading.

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Re: The perfect OCD compliant nuclear power plant! --- Now v2.4!

Post by Laogeodritt »

ElPresidente wrote:Factorio 0.15.22 released

Changes:
Inserters will no longer drop what they are holding when disabled by the circuit network.

I think this breaks the fuel loading.
Indeed—I'm looking at a blackout right now.

I intend to stick to 0.15.21 for the time being, where I can, since it seems a number of people are complaining—we'll see what 0.15.23 brings or what the devs say.

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Re: The perfect OCD compliant nuclear power plant! --- Now v2.4!

Post by fregate84 »

Blackout too :-(

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Re: The perfect OCD compliant nuclear power plant! --- Now v2.4!

Post by mrvn »

MBas wrote:I really dont get why so many people still uses so many combinator logic for simply fuel input... :)
reactor.png
Because you will be inserting 5 (2? 10? what's the buffer size here?) fuel cells into the reactor without the steam changing. If you add enough tanks for steam that is no problem but you will work in much larger batches.

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Re: The perfect OCD compliant nuclear power plant! --- Now v2.4!

Post by Chocki »

Babelfish's work around works perfectly. He just forgot to mention to set the inserter read option to hold instead of pulse. Yes, the fix will disable the alarm system... but who really uses that?

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Re: The perfect OCD compliant nuclear power plant! --- Now v2.4!

Post by Twsted »

there is a problem with the code for the first Reactor setup.
It says :
Error while importing string:
(Tile has no items to place: Hazard concrete right) ....
for this string --- 8 REACTOR BUILD V2.4
I copied the string twice, and still got same error when importing it into factorio.

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Re: The perfect OCD compliant nuclear power plant! --- Now v2.4!

Post by Distelzombie »

Sorry guys. I can't work on it. Im away and will stay away for a couple months maybe. Have some things to work out.
Complete 2-Lane system as a Blueprint-Book! The perfect OCD reactor? Testing chained science lab efficiency Please use real prefixes and proper rounding!

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Re: The perfect OCD compliant nuclear power plant! --- Now v2.4!

Post by Laogeodritt »

Twsted wrote:there is a problem with the code for the first Reactor setup.
Try the full blueprint book (2/4/8-reactor blueprints), which includes that one - it's a link to a pastebin in the original post.

If not, here's my export of the 8-reactor blueprint only, exported from version 0.15.28—see if this works? I don't think the blueprint strings should have changed/broken between updates but if so...
8 Reactor Power Plant v2.4

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Do we need steam tanks?

Post by mrvn »

Some other discussion made me wonder if tons of steam tanks for nuclear power are actually needed.

Correct me if I'm wrong but here is how I think nuclear reactors work:

- fuel is consumed at a steady rate at all times
- if fuel is consumed the reactor adds heat to the internal storage until it reaches 1000°
- heat is drawn out of the reactor into the heat pipes until equilibrium
- heat is drawn into heat exchangers until equilibrium
- heat is converted into steam when an heat exchanger is >= 500° and the output buffer isn't full

The only way energy is wasted is when the reactor hits 1000°C, burns fuel but can't store the heat. So the goal must be to keep the reactor below 1000°C. On the other hand if the whole setup cools down too much between fuel cells then it takes too long to get heated up again and you might run out of power. Plus you can't measure the temperature, only the amount of steam in a tank. So some steam tanks are needed to trigger a refueling and to bridge the gap till the whole setup heats up again.

But does it needs to be huge? Isn't it more efficient to store energy as heat and only have a few steam tanks to trigger refueling? It's to bad one can't connect wires to heat pipes or heat exchangers to measure the temperature.

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Re: The perfect OCD compliant nuclear power plant! --- Now v2.4!

Post by Cobaltur »

Finally not "a single 8 core setup" blueprint.
A book with increments nice.
good job

For fast usage the 1 reactor setup is missing, in early stage its expensive enough and not wise to start directly with 2 reactors.
And 1 reactor has only 1/4 of exchangers etc.

so the 1 reactor setup would be final touch for the book

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Re: Do we need steam tanks?

Post by kann_ »

mrvn wrote:Some other discussion made me wonder if tons of steam tanks for nuclear power are actually needed.

Correct me if I'm wrong but here is how I think nuclear reactors work:

- fuel is consumed at a steady rate at all times
- if fuel is consumed the reactor adds heat to the internal storage until it reaches 1000°
- heat is drawn out of the reactor into the heat pipes until equilibrium
- heat is drawn into heat exchangers until equilibrium
- heat is converted into steam when an heat exchanger is >= 500° and the output buffer isn't full

The only way energy is wasted is when the reactor hits 1000°C, burns fuel but can't store the heat. So the goal must be to keep the reactor below 1000°C. On the other hand if the whole setup cools down too much between fuel cells then it takes too long to get heated up again and you might run out of power. Plus you can't measure the temperature, only the amount of steam in a tank. So some steam tanks are needed to trigger a refueling and to bridge the gap till the whole setup heats up again.

But does it needs to be huge? Isn't it more efficient to store energy as heat and only have a few steam tanks to trigger refueling? It's to bad one can't connect wires to heat pipes or heat exchangers to measure the temperature.
I believe this is all correct. I made a lot of tests in creative mode. A typical reactor setup with at least 3 heat pipes per heat exchanger has enough heat capacity to store all heat generated by each reactor independent of the size without any steam tanks. This is because every heat exchanger and heat pipe can store 0.5 GJ. [ (12 pipes + 4 heat exchanger) * 0.5 GJ = 8 GJ ] Note: it is a bit lower due to fluid mechanics, but in reality there are additional heat pipes and the reactor has an additional 5 GJ buffer.

The problem is what you already stated. While nuclear reactors heat up at a constant rate, the heat has to reach the heat exchangers and this is quite slow. So you cant run them on-demand very well. If you store some of the power in steam you have a good buffer until the rector is running at full power again. I think 3-6 steam tanks are a good number per effective reactor.

TLDR: If you have a very low or almost 100% consumption you could be fine with just one tank for measuring the load, but with unstable consumption or intermediate values steam tanks will help to balance things out.

The interesting part, which some reactor setups seem to get wrong is that the reactor should be restarted once the steam levels are dropping and not once the steam levels are already low. Dropping steam levels indicate that the internal reactor heat is getting low, which means the internal heat capacity is low enough to get refilled. While low steam levels show that both, the internal heat capacity and the steam tanks are empty, which might be too late to restart the reactor in time.

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