Inspired by DaveMcW's thread on compact reactors (posting.php?mode=reply&f=208&t=68885#preview), I wanted to see what would happen if we stop caring about perfect ratios, but go for a simple design instead.
Start with a 2 reactor 160MW design:
When you need more energy, you can mirror and extend to 480 MW:
Compared to optimal setups, this wastes 4 turbines (for the 2 reactor setup) but it saves a lot of heat pipes, normal pipes, space, and especially design headache compared to most 'optimal' designs.
The current design is 'dumb', assuming nuclear fuel is cheap; you can add smarts if you want by adding a measurement tank and insertion logic. I've not tested what the heat capacity of the design is, so it might still waste fuel on very light loads with adding steam tanks or more heat pipes.
Just realized that one tricky aspect of the design above is that it assumes you can get water from both sides. It's also not very belt friendly since you can't pass a belt under the reactors.
Here is a version that takes water from the side, also making it easier to use belts if you want as there is room to circle a belt around the reactors:
(note that the 2 reactor design needs 2 pumps, but the 4 reactor design needs 2x3 pumps to get full output. Each pipe transports 1237 water/s, so you can have 12 pipe segments between source and sink without needing extra pumps, giving you 6 segments between the edge of the reactor and the offshore pump before the bottom pipe gets into trouble. The setup shown above gets the full output, and you should be able to achieve it one step further out, but I don't fully understand fluid flow when combining sinks such as here (with 3 offshores feeding 2 pipes)
Perfect ratios aren't that bad if you stop caring about hitting them all at the same time. Here's my 1.1GW plant that supposedly wastes 31 turbines (had to look up the numbers ;p), but has "perfect" heat exchangers. The real limit here is pipe throughput. If you use one-sided input you need maximum input pressure. I use a specially design "cooling water pond" because it looks cool :D.
Perfect ratios aren't that bad if you stop caring about hitting them all at the same time. Here's my 1.1GW plant that supposedly wastes 31 turbines (had to look up the numbers ;p), but has "perfect" heat exchangers. The real limit here is pipe throughput. If you use one-sided input you need maximum input pressure. I use a specially design "cooling water pond" because it looks cool .
Cool, thanks for sharing
My designs above also use the right ratio of reactors : exchangers, it's going for 1:2 exchanger:turbine instead of the optimal 10:5.82 = 1:1.72 that makes the designs a lot cleaner by eliminating steam pipes.
And yes, the biggest difficulty in nuclear design is fluid throughput (with heat pipes a close second, esp. given the lack of pumps or underground options). Limiting to 8 exchangers per fluid pipe makes it trivial (>200 pipe segments between pumps), and 12 is doable (12 segments) but anything more becomes difficult really quickly. You hit that more quickly with bigger plants, which explains that in your design it's trickier to supply enough water...
Water flow is significantly faster in non-pipes (boilers, tanks, pumps) which is why above design works at all :). And as you can see the outer lanes are connected with double heatpipes to give it a last tiny boost. It's basically a maximized version of your simple short layout.
Very nice and space compact design which should be able to produce enough energy to handle 100 SPM factories.
As you said, the setups "waste" a few turbines (4 turbines for 2x1 reactor setup, 13 for 2x2 reactor setup according to https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Nucl ... hbor_bonus) but anyone who needs this much power should have spare copper and iron anyway.
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