Design Goals:
- 1. be adaptable -- automatically changes based on power demand
- 2. simple -- requires little circuitry and if possible no combinators
- 3. extendable -- easy to add additional reactors
Nuclear Reactor setup
On the inserter that removes the spent fuel i have a circuit condition to only remove it if steam is below a certain value. I also have it set to read hand contents and "hold" mode.
Inserter conditions
No clock is needed since the inserter can only work when a spent fuel cell is available. On the other side, this inserter uses a different value of steam.
Second reactor inserter conditions
The fuel inserter is connected to the out inserter on the green wire, while steam is on the red wire. The fuel inserter is set to work when Spent fuel cell is greater than 0 and stack size is set to 1, so it will only move one cell at a time.
input inserter conditions
The green wire allows each reactor to be loaded independently of the other allowing each to run when needed. This requires having a steam tank connected to the red wire to read the amount of steam in the tank to track steam usage. This setup needs very few tanks as they are only needed to read the power draw of the steam turbines as they use only as much steam as is needed for the current power load. When that load increases steam gets used faster causing steam levels to fall, and when load drops, steam levels rise. This system reacts to the changes in steam and refuels reactors when needed to meet demand.This can all be done without combinators if you don't mind calculating the steam levels yourself, which might need to change as you add more tanks/reactors. So i devised this simple combinator setup to that for me.
Control Combinator Computer
It's not very complex or big as it's just 2 constant combinators and 3 arithmetic combinators. The first combinator inputs steam and divides it by the number of steam tanks connected getting this number from the first constant combinator.
Steam tank input
This has to be set manually in the constant combinator. This first math combinator simply finds the average amount of steam in each tank and outputs it on the white signal. The second math combinator does some math to express this as a percentage of tank capacity output on the green signal. The third math combinator then subtracts this amount from the control signals.
Nuclear Fuel Control signals
Currently pictured here with ten signals with desired activation percents. The highest is set to 95% so there is a chance to shut down the reactors if there is no load. These can also be changed easily in the constant combinator if you want/need different levels. More signals can also be added to control more reactors.If you need help figuring how much reactors produce with neighbor bonuses, I also created this combinator calculator to help.
Nuclear power Calculator
It outputs the result (in MW) to the power pole making it simple to use without a numeric display.
Nuclear Power Calculator Input
All you have to do is give the amount of reactors (here pictured with 10) in the top left reactor number. Pay no attention to the -1 in the corner. Ten reactors results in it displaying 1.4k which is 1.4 GW of power, displayed exactly as it is in the power graph window. The actual amount is 1.44 GW, but neither display will show it.
Numbers which will be wrong
Nuclear Core Blueprint String
Nuclear Fuel Controller Blueprint String
Nuclear Power Calculator Blueprint String