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20GW Nuclear Reactor Design

Posted: Wed Jun 28, 2017 9:09 am
by nthexwn
Blueprint: https://factorioprints.com/view/-Knh6UB1rtQbBtKkxb0X
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

Re: 20GW Nuclear Reactor Design

Posted: Wed Jul 12, 2017 6:04 pm
by klauskaan
I'm impressed :)

Re: 20GW Nuclear Reactor Design

Posted: Wed Jul 12, 2017 9:36 pm
by golfmiketango
Nice work! I've been driving myself semi-crazy trying to invent a layout along similar lines that actually works.

Re: 20GW Nuclear Reactor Design

Posted: Thu Jul 13, 2017 6:32 am
by DeathMers
This is exactly what I was looking for (thumbsup)

Re: 20GW Nuclear Reactor Design

Posted: Thu Jul 13, 2017 9:35 am
by mrvn
In my own design I used an underground pipe between the heat exchangers and the steam turbines with pumps at both ends. This allows the unbotteling assembler to be placed between the two. No need for pumps for water at all. And only 3 or 4 pumps for the steam. Somewhere in the middle of the heat exchangers and at the end. This kept all the heat exchangers below 100% steam.

I only did this for an 8 reactor setup but apart from the first and last the columns are all identical. So that changes nothing.

Re: 20GW Nuclear Reactor Design

Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2017 1:51 am
by Ober3550
I have a similar design to this that pumps water from the inside out instead of bothering with any barrelling or high throughput pump magic and stuff. Just my choice though. The reactor design I have is my own spin on Hopewell's design and I use accumulators for fuel control. If you want I can help out with the combinators for fuel control. Unlike hopewell I have a much better combinator setup.

EDIT: I've gone back and looked at the design I've been using. It's theoretically perfect but practically has some kinks I probably need to work out

Re: 20GW Nuclear Reactor Design

Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2017 5:24 am
by impetus maximus
11088 pumps. :shock: are all of them necessary?

next you will have to show your barreling process.
creative matter source don't count :P

Re: 20GW Nuclear Reactor Design

Posted: Fri Oct 13, 2017 9:37 am
by DScoffers
I'm not the OP, but I have borrowed this design for my map.
I tested various methods for the barrel delivery and collection in vanilla.

At first I tried logistic bot delivery and collection.
Result: Needs to be in its own logistic network. Soooo many bots required

Then just logistic bot collection of empty barrels with delivery of water barrels by belt.
Result: Worked really well in a separate logistic network, with active providers on empty barrel output, and local storage chests for when the turbines are not using full water throughput.
But still a hell of a lot of robots. And this is the main problem. If you want to add a 2nd setup, that's a huge number of robots to be added just to get it running.

Final design:
Belts for delivery and collection of barrels.
Result: Spaghetti hell, but works beautifully when all delivery and collection belts are full of barrels.

I use 5 of these setups and just about to build my 6th setup for a total of 120GW.

Re: 20GW Nuclear Reactor Design

Posted: Fri Oct 13, 2017 3:21 pm
by MisterSpock
DScoffers wrote:I'm not the OP, but I have borrowed this design for my map.
I tested various methods for the barrel delivery and collection in vanilla.

At first I tried logistic bot delivery and collection.
Result: Needs to be in its own logistic network. Soooo many bots required

Then just logistic bot collection of empty barrels with delivery of water barrels by belt.
Result: Worked really well in a separate logistic network, with active providers on empty barrel output, and local storage chests for when the turbines are not using full water throughput.
But still a hell of a lot of robots. And this is the main problem. If you want to add a 2nd setup, that's a huge number of robots to be added just to get it running.

Final design:
Belts for delivery and collection of barrels.
Result: Spaghetti hell, but works beautifully when all delivery and collection belts are full of barrels.

I use 5 of these setups and just about to build my 6th setup for a total of 120GW.
You use 5 of them??? :?:
How big is your factory? How many ups you got?

I did test one of this thing in creative mode and my ups dropped down to 45ups. How can you build 6 of them?

Re: 20GW Nuclear Reactor Design

Posted: Fri Oct 13, 2017 11:55 pm
by DScoffers
Yeh, I have 100GW built already.

My base is pretty big.
I enjoy going for high rockets per minute.

https://i.imgur.com/V0AZNSF.png

In the screenshot, the 5 x 20GW nuclear reactor setups are at the far left.
To give you an idea, I've laid down 19 million concrete.
I don't lay down concrete where I might still want to mine to make it easier to spot resources on the map view, hence the big gaps.

When my base is idle it's using 50GW because of all of the Speed3 beacons.
I've tested a backup save in creative mode, and it uses 130GW when fully running.

When the base is idle, I have 7.5 FPS/UPS.
When the base is running, I'll get around 2.5 FPS/UPS, so the base is always idle (not launching rockets) while building.
I did a basic test once, and deleted all of the nuclear builds in creative mode, while using a passive energy source to keep the base running. It went from 7.5 to 15.5 FPS/UPS. However, building 130GW of solar is simply not feasible.

AMD FX-8150 OC @ 4.62GHz
AMD 7970 Crossfire OC @ 1050/1525
16GB RAM DDR3

Total Chunks: 59,500
Active Chunks: 17,000

Total Entities: 8,000,000
Active Entities: 600,000
(when base is idle)

Re: 20GW Nuclear Reactor Design

Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2017 3:12 am
by Jap2.0
DScoffers wrote:Yeh, I have 100GW built already.

My base is pretty big.
I enjoy going for high rockets per minute.

https://i.imgur.com/V0AZNSF.png

In the screenshot, the 5 x 20GW nuclear reactor setups are at the far left.
To give you an idea, I've laid down 19 million concrete.
I don't lay down concrete where I might still want to mine to make it easier to spot resources on the map view, hence the big gaps.

When my base is idle it's using 50GW because of all of the Speed3 beacons.
I've tested a backup save in creative mode, and it uses 130GW when fully running.

When the base is idle, I have 7.5 FPS/UPS.
When the base is running, I'll get around 2.5 FPS/UPS, so the base is always idle (not launching rockets) while building.
I did a basic test once, and deleted all of the nuclear builds in creative mode, while using a passive energy source to keep the base running. It went from 7.5 to 15.5 FPS/UPS. However, building 130GW of solar is simply not feasible.

AMD FX-8150 OC @ 4.62GHz
AMD 7970 Crossfire OC @ 1050/1525
16GB RAM DDR3

Total Chunks: 59,500
Active Chunks: 17,000

Total Entities: 8,000,000
Active Entities: 600,000
(when base is idle)
May I suggest you post it here?

Re: 20GW Nuclear Reactor Design

Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2017 12:05 pm
by MisterSpock
OMG,

Thats the reason why i never go over 2k science perminute. Because my processor cant do more science/minute of real time.

At 2,5 UPS it takes how many longer than normal? :shock:

Re: 20GW Nuclear Reactor Design

Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2017 12:15 pm
by MeduSalem
DScoffers wrote:When my base is idle it's using 50GW because of all of the Speed3 beacons.
Wouldn't it be better to use Power Switches to turn off the parts of the factory that are not running so not to waste power on idle Speed Beacons?

Or would that worsen the UPS because of increased complexity when switching on/off power.


At least I wouldn't be able to stand an idle power draw of 50GW.

Re: 20GW Nuclear Reactor Design

Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2017 1:09 pm
by DScoffers
I've basically stopped doing research now. I'm slowly doing the next Mining Productivity research with just one lab.
Worker robot speed: 15
Mining Productivity: 114
MeduSalem wrote:
Wouldn't it be better to use Power Switches to turn off the parts of the factory that are not running so not to waste power on idle Speed Beacons?

Or would that worsen the UPS because of increased complexity when switching on/off power.


At least I wouldn't be able to stand an idle power draw of 50GW.
I believe it would lower the UPS so I've avoided using power switches.
The whole map is one big roboport network, so disabling power is trickier and would leave massive gaps in the network for robots to cross.
There are 25,000 Assembling machine 3's and 90,000 Speed3 beacons, so this would also be a very big task to complete.

There is also no shortage of uranium ore, so I don't need to save on fuel. I don't even have limiters on the nuclear reactor inserters, they simply run 100% of the time. This might save a few UPS though, so I'll look in to it.

But more importantly, the idea is that when the base is finished, then all miners, electric furnaces, assemblers etc. will be working 99% of the time, so putting in power switches seems unnecessary.

Any other suggestions are definitely welcome.

Re: 20GW Nuclear Reactor Design

Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2017 7:08 am
by LazyGao
at 2.5 ups 60 updates takes 24 seconds therefore the time for a rocket to be built is 24 times as theoretical time if i'm doing the math right.
so doesn't that conflict with your purpose - to launch rocket faster?

Re: 20GW Nuclear Reactor Design

Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2017 8:20 pm
by DScoffers
Yes, LazyGao, you're logic is right.
However, it doesn't quite work like that for RPM challenges.

Speedrunning to the first rocket launch, like AntiElitz does every weekend on Twitch, is measured in time in real life.
When measuring RPM challenges, it's measured by in-game time.

In real time it would be slower RPM at that UPS.

I use a mod called Score Extended: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/binbinhfr/ScoreExtended
This mod records "rocket launches per second in game time."