So I tried building my first infinitely repeatable reactor..

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Kryptos
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So I tried building my first infinitely repeatable reactor..

Post by Kryptos »

And here it is!
Expandable Reactor Map.jpg
Expandable Reactor Map.jpg (89.93 KiB) Viewed 3862 times
Water comes in by train, not a single bot in sight, which makes construction somewhat annoying, and it comes with a nuclear fuel refinery that inputs iron and U238, reprocesses spent fuel, and also has a backup reactor that is hooked up near the fuel input train in case of blackout. The nuclear fuel refinery has a train stop for a fuel train, which feeds everything but the water trains. Note that at the expansion edge of the reactor is a belt loop which feeds spent fuel back into the fuel train, which will have to be spaced accordingly. I do not expect any throughput issues with a single lane of a blue belt in the foreseeable (read, 1TW+) future, so that's all I left in there.

This has not been stress-tested, as my base does not draw enough power, but it appears that you need at least three water tanker trains on deck at any given moment to avoid blackouts and brownouts due to lack of water. I may need to redesign the water input so that a single train car fills each storage tank separately, as opposed to how it is currently set up with each tanker car filling up three storage tanks. I use a 2-6 single headed train standard for cargo on this map, and I have an off-site water filling station, where this guy seems to consume two entire filling rails just to keep up.

Future expansions would require building additional train stations and additional stackers to house the same three train backlog, I believe. I am thinking once I start using all this power, I'll try to build a quadruple rail to each side, of which three rails are constant train stops and the fourth taking outbound empty trains.

I am also considering having an off-site, uh, "re-bottling" station which converts standard 2-6 tankers into behemoth supertankers that are as long as the reactor line itself. I am not sure if this would work well or not, however. Hence the quad-rail idea.

As the blueprint string is too long for this forum post, I have uploaded a txt file with the blueprint string.

There are also probably a few superfluous chests from where I stored materials locally, and forgot about.
Nuclear Reactor.txt
(83.25 KiB) Downloaded 140 times

Aeternus
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Re: So I tried building my first infinitely repeatable reactor..

Post by Aeternus »

Under load, each heat exchanger will require 103 water per second. I can't make out where these exchangers are, but either they're too far from the reactors to effectively get heat, or the trains themselves are too far from the exchangers to feed them water at the speed they'll need it. I did some math while considering trains for my own design... came to the conclusion tat on peak load, you'd need a train for each exchanger row every 40 seconds. The reduced capacity of the tanker wagon makes trains unviable.

My own design will use a lot of landfilling to create a canal on each side where pumps can draw directly from.

Kryptos
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Re: So I tried building my first infinitely repeatable reactor..

Post by Kryptos »

Each reactor has two dedicated pipes running the length to feed 8 heat exchangers a piece. According to the table here:
https://wiki.factorio.com/Fluid_system
That gives me at least 209 tiles to play with. As far as I understand, underground pipes count as 2 pipes for their entire length, and they run the length of 27 steam turbines, which is 5 tiles plus 2 tiles for the steam piping, so 28*7=196, even if I didn't use underground pipes, I'd be fine on water flow.

Trains I just tinkered with some more, and found that it is impractical to have the train condition for water drop off to be "water = 0". I noticed that water was building up in the front tanks and clogging the system, as a tanker waited with 16k water in the front tank and five empties. I tried setting the wait condition until "Water < 25000", so it will leave if only one tank is full. This immediately evened out my water input tanks, so I suspect that the 25k wait condition can be adjusted down safely for more efficiency. I wanna do some math to figure that out separately, but I think setting it to 5-10k water left in the tanker train total would be around ideal.

25000/(103*24)=10 and change seconds per train. That's doable. Considering each pump pumps at 1600/s, and each pipe only uses 824/s to run the 8 exchangers, I figure you should be able to pump down a train fast enough as long as your next train is in the station in under 5 seconds.

I do believe that the limit would be the transfer rate of the heat pipes. What's the latest calculations on heat pipe throughput?

According to https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... _mechanic/, I figure I lose a little bit at max load, since I have I believe 50 heat pipes per heat stack.

Aeternus
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Re: So I tried building my first infinitely repeatable reactor..

Post by Aeternus »

If you have issues unloading fast enough you can always use an extra 2 tanks per wagon as a buffer, then use some combinator logics to gate the unloading pumps if a specific tank isn't getting unloaded fast enough. I've done something similar in my design for steam.

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