Factorio Forums

Hello Everyone,

i love nuclear power in Factorio, love the the enrichment process and basically everything about it.

I am building my very first mega base (my maximum was 300 spm) and before i started i read tips for mega bases and one of them was :
do not use nuclear power
Obviously because of FPS and UPS (due to steam calculation)

Can someone create basic Nuclear Power plant mod that will add NuclearPowerplant building which will require 2 inputs (water and Uranium235)
and will generate 40MW ?

I now its kinda lame , without the heat pipes and steam turbines (i would not be able to use my own layout) , but at least i would be able to use nuclear power

To make nuclear easier. A few thing to consider is that you want to consume less u235 than you are producing. And because of randomness, this is unreliable. And thats why you early game, unless you know what you are doing, you should avoid it.

The kovarex process however ensures a steady flow of u235 as long as you have enough u238 to keep it going. Each kovarex cycle takes 60 seconds, which means you can say you produce 1 u235 per minute reliably (and using some logic system you can cause it to nicely overflow out of the kovarex system). At this point nuclear becomes quite a bit easier to manage. And once you resolve this, your next issue isnt going to be an issue anyway.

Each u235 can provide 10 fuel cells. Which each last 2 mintues. This means that for 1 centrifuge for kovarex, you can provide 2 reactors.

If you never exceed the capacity of a reactor, steam isnt going to become that much of an issue, except you will lose some of the potential power because the fuel keeps burning. This means that as long as you can provide uranium, it will last. Extra u235 can be stockpiled if needed (and its recommended to always stock a bit of both).

To prevent loses, some extra logic can be used, but depending on playstyle (or with mods), this can be prevented.

I think you dont realy need that other structure, because once your kovarex system works, you can get your power to work quite easily. The most complex part is either preventing that system from blocking, or preventing loss of steam.

If you dont want to bother with the losses of steam, you can do an alternative thing: you make nuclear rocket fuel and use that in boilers. This fuel lasts long anyway. It surely gives a bit less power though, but its also easier to manage.

Daqidius wrote: ↑

Tue Oct 05, 2021 8:54 am

I am building my very first mega base (my maximum was 300 spm) and before i started i read tips for mega bases and one of them was :
do not use nuclear power
Obviously because of FPS and UPS (due to steam calculation)

Keep in mind most of the stuff about nuclear's UPS cost was written a LONG time ago back when it first came out, and keeps being repeated despite changes in the game. The optimization that's been done then have VASTLY reduced that down to a fraction of what it was. While it can never beat solar, since solar only needs 1 calculation per network (plus another for the accumulators charging/discharging), my 1k SPM megabase has been running on a very much not optimized 8 independent setups of 8 reactors since 0.15 just fine.

For instance, most of those old posts talk about the fluid system being a major time hog. On 1.1, my fluid update time is less than 0.1 ms, and that's EVERYTHING on the map, not just the reactor setups. Heat manager is the biggest cost, and that's still under half a ms. And I'm on an 11+ year old CPU+DDR2 RAM.

Nuclear's perfectly fine and viable as is unless you are deliberately trying to build the absolute largest possible base without UPS dipping, in which case you're going to end up using solar anyway over a mod that makes slightly more efficient reactors.

If you do find that nuclear affects your UPS there are a number of existing mods that rescale the numbers in nuclear power or just package up the whole thing into one entity; e.g. see https://mods.factorio.com/query/Nuclear ... ersion=1.1

My understanding is that if you're going for like 2000-3000 SPM, then nuclear power won't be bad enough to lower your UPS, unless the entire rest of your base is also incredibly UPS-inefficient.