Friday Facts #164 - Nuclear power

[RobertTerwilliger]

''so trying it shut down too late might not be enough to prevent overheating and explosion ... a big one.''

So... do we have an example anywhere in history for that? I mean, explosion.

YES!
In Chernobyl (Ukraine/USSR) it was a stress test with disabled safety systems (no circuits)) to find out how much power can reactor gain at the very maximum.
Aftermath is well-known all over the world.

Apocalyptic theory

Interesting thing, this disaster was even treated by some groups of people as a sign of upcoming Apocalypse.
You see, the plant "chernobyl" is a local name of Artemisia vulgaris, that is also called "wormwood".
Falling of the star/angel, named Wormwood is considered "the third trumpet" in "Book of Revelation", and the final "sign" for theory followers was the fact that USSR energy industry used (and still uses) star icon.

[sabriath]

YES!
In Chernobyl (Ukraine/USSR) it was a stress test with disabled safety systems (no circuits)) to find out how much power can reactor gain at the very maximum.
Aftermath is well-known all over the world.

False....power plants do not explode, they have a melt down. A nuclear bomb requires a precise spherical explosion inward that detonates the core of at least 20% enrichment and the trigger together inside a containment vessel to form an explosive cloud.....nuclear power plants do not have spherical detonators, nor triggers, and the core is usually less than 20% in pellet form within a bath of deuterium inside an open chamber with vaulted ceilings....not much confinement.

Huge difference. When a power plant goes critical, like in the case of Chernobyl, the water evaporates violently leaving air pockets between the gaps of the pellets, which causes even more heat....usually melting and fusing the control rods. Eventually it reaches a point where there's a solid block of extremely hot radiated metal sitting in a basin at the bottom of the empty bath. No boom, no pow, no woosh....that's why they call it a meltdown. The first thing to do in such a situation is to wall off the entire building in lead-laced concrete slabs....and if you can't robot the material out safely in containment, you leave the whole thing alone for thousands of years.

But an explosion is more sci-fi and fun, so sure....whatever.

[Grimakar]

YES!
In Chernobyl (Ukraine/USSR) it was a stress test with disabled safety systems (no circuits)) to find out how much power can reactor gain at the very maximum.
Aftermath is well-known all over the world.

False....power plants do not explode, they have a melt down. A nuclear bomb requires a precise spherical explosion inward that detonates the core of at least 20% enrichment and the trigger together inside a containment vessel to form an explosive cloud.....nuclear power plants do not have spherical detonators, nor triggers, and the core is usually less than 20% in pellet form within a bath of deuterium inside an open chamber with vaulted ceilings....not much confinement.

Huge difference. When a power plant goes critical, like in the case of Chernobyl, the water evaporates violently leaving air pockets between the gaps of the pellets, which causes even more heat....usually melting and fusing the control rods. Eventually it reaches a point where there's a solid block of extremely hot radiated metal sitting in a basin at the bottom of the empty bath. No boom, no pow, no woosh....that's why they call it a meltdown. The first thing to do in such a situation is to wall off the entire building in lead-laced concrete slabs....and if you can't robot the material out safely in containment, you leave the whole thing alone for thousands of years.

But an explosion is more sci-fi and fun, so sure....whatever.

Maybe I am just too sceptical, but when I open the wikipedia page for the chernobyl disaster and search for the word explosion, it says 46. Maybe it was just the head of the security chief, that exploded 46 times. But who knows.

[mrvn]

You (can) get an explosion from the cooling materials. The water becomes steam, gets even hotter, pressure rises and at some point BOOM and you have a large steam cloud. Worse if the inner cooling circuit blows because that tends to be radioactive I think.

Anyway, if we have to have an explosion, I like the idea of the reactor not blowing itself up totally. Because if it does then the construction robots would just build a new one and all you get is a short power drop. Just make sure you have a spare reactor in storage at all times and a melt down is quickly over. Would be more painful to have the reactor vent a large cloud of radioactives that damage stuff in a largish region around the reactor. Destroy some nearby belts, damage surrounding assemblers, blow up construction robots that fly through the cloud to soon. But leave an unusable reactor behind. So the user has to go and remove / deconstruct it before placing a new reactor. No automatic fixing the mistake so it actually hurts.

[rolfl]

It's really simple, everyone. Any time there's a large amount of energy contained in a small amount of space, and that energy is released in an uncontrolled event, it's essentially an explosion.

A nuclear detonation in a nuclear power station is almost certainly "impossible" unless something is maliciously done to the system in order to turn it in to a bomb. But, by design, the system contains huge amounts of energy, potential energy, and if that energy is not appropriately controlled, contained, and released, there will be spectacular consequences. There are many places in any nuclear power station where that energy is stored or released, and all of those places have carefully designed control systems that, to hopefully excruciating standards, manage that energy. There are high-pressure systems, systems with nuclear potential energy, chemical potential energy, immense kinetic energy, systems with large amounts of heat, and systems that combine all those potential energy components. Each system has a set of failure modes that the engineers have hopefully accounted for in their designs, but for each failure mode, there's a risk that the failure exceeds the ability of the system to contain it, or even that the probability of that failure is deemed too low to even implement a failure-containment system. Even worse, if one (even small) failure triggers, or exacerbates another failure, then a cascade of failures can easily overwhelm whole system.

An exploding power plant is certainly possible - it has happened in a number of instances.

An exploding Nuclear power plant is also possible - it has happened in a number of instances, but the differences is that the explosion is not likely going to come from a system that compromises the containment of radioactive consequences (although even that happens in real life too, and not just to old/badly-maintained power stations).

In real life terms, there's a reason why all power stations (nuclear and non-nuclear) have comprehensive safety plans, failure management systems, and containment systems. Things break. In systems with more energy, the standards of both the primary and safety systems have to be more demanding. In nuclear power stations they are more demanding.

In factorio, though, we, the player, are responsible for ensuring that these standards are met, and that our power generation systems can contain/control their energy. Frankly, there should be changes made to our existing power systems (solar, steam) such that sometimes they explode, causing damage, for example, if you drive in to a steam engine, it should explode, damaging things around it, not just the engine itself. A Biter damaging an accumulator should take out all the other accumulators around it since they have batteries in them that can "vent with flame".

In factorio, we can throw a cluster-grenade too close to ourselves, and kill ourselves. If we behave badly with a nuclear station can we not kill ourselves too?

[Hertzila]

YES!
In Chernobyl (Ukraine/USSR) it was a stress test with disabled safety systems (no circuits)) to find out how much power can reactor gain at the very maximum.
Aftermath is well-known all over the world.

Maybe I am just too sceptical, but when I open the wikipedia page for the chernobyl disaster and search for the word explosion, it says 46. Maybe it was just the head of the security chief, that exploded 46 times. But who knows.

As it happens, the Wikipedia page specifically mentions that it was a "steam explosion", the kind that usually happens in malfunctioning boilers and steam engines. The reactor itself just melted itself into a pile of radioactive slag, hence the term 'meltdown'. The explosion and the disaster come from the fact that as it melted down, it also flash-boiled the coolant water into steam which subsequently built up the pressure until it exploded out of its pipes and broke the containment measures. Cue it happening again (or a hydrogen explosion, we're not exactly sure) with no containment to spread a massive amount of nuclear fallout everywhere and you have the worst nuclear disaster in history.
Again, the reactor itself didn't blow up. The control / containment systems did. Important difference, since most of the damage caused by the disaster wasn't from the explosion but from the fallout.

Which brings us back neatly to Factorio, which already has a system of feedback based on the amount of pollution the player releases into the air. If a nuclear reactor was overpressured and couldn't cool itself down with water and it didn't have SCRAM installed / was damaged badly enough that SCRAM failed, yes, it could potentially suffer the same fate as Chernobyl. Which again, wasn't a nuke going off but a steam explosion blowing up radioactive pollution everywhere. So the big problem the incredibly careless player now has to suffer is not their base missing after a nuke happened, but a massive wave of incoming biters to their newly blacked out base with a reactor that is basically an immovable slag pile and a cloud of pollution that won't be going anywhere for a long while. Sounds a lot more like compelling gameplay than "You made a mistake, now you basically need to restart the game as you no longer have a base."

[factoriouzr]

You (can) get an explosion from the cooling materials. The water becomes steam, gets even hotter, pressure rises and at some point BOOM and you have a large steam cloud. Worse if the inner cooling circuit blows because that tends to be radioactive I think.

Anyway, if we have to have an explosion, I like the idea of the reactor not blowing itself up totally. Because if it does then the construction robots would just build a new one and all you get is a short power drop. Just make sure you have a spare reactor in storage at all times and a melt down is quickly over. Would be more painful to have the reactor vent a large cloud of radioactives that damage stuff in a largish region around the reactor. Destroy some nearby belts, damage surrounding assemblers, blow up construction robots that fly through the cloud to soon. But leave an unusable reactor behind. So the user has to go and remove / deconstruct it before placing a new reactor. No automatic fixing the mistake so it actually hurts.

I think robots SHOULD be able to repair and replace the reactor, regardless of it if blows up completely or not, robots should automatically fix it if available and within roboport range. If you make it so robots can't repair or replace it, then you break a part of the functionality of the game, ie you make construction robots useless for this situation. This is not a good idea. If you are at the late stage of the game, the whole fixing/replacing should be automated as it is for everything else. Introducing exceptions is a bad idea. This isn't a competitive online game, if you don't like robots fixing your reactor, you could just not use them where your reactor is. Also, remember that this whole game is about automation. Preventing automatic repair would go against this.

[zerostryfe]

Hey loved your article about your ideas for the power plants. A quick thing for your heat retaining idea there is a system we are working on at power plants (Concentrated Solar) that uses molten salt. The idea is that you siphon off heat from your super heaters into a salt storage tank. That heats the salt to a molten state, and that then is used after the sun has set. This allows the plant to use the heated salt to keep heaters going for several hours.

[Mroczny_Pasterz]

Hey loved your article about your ideas for the power plants. A quick thing for your heat retaining idea there is a system we are working on at power plants (Concentrated Solar) that uses molten salt. The idea is that you siphon off heat from your super heaters into a salt storage tank. That heats the salt to a molten state, and that then is used after the sun has set. This allows the plant to use the heated salt to keep heaters going for several hours.

Yeah I wanted to write about the same thing but I forgot.
There are also underground heat storage composed of geothermal energy. Simply You heat up the ground, and because there is a lot of it, there is a lot of heat capacity. The hole is drilled 200-300 metres underground and filled with pipes with hot water. Hot water heats the ground and when it is needed cold water is pumped through pipes so they take accumulated heat.

For molten salt, we would need salt so I think we need a desalination plant for that

[ChurchOrganist]

For molten salt, we would need salt so I think we need a desalination plant for that

Or a simple evaporation plant. If you've ever played with Bob's mods, you'll know what I mean.

[MrGrim]

Take a look at Industrial Craft 2 from Minecraft, their nuclear reactor, although many people thought they were fun, but JUST because they COULD explode and destroy their base, the MAJORITY of the people felt really UNHAPPY when things went BOOM and half of their base gets destroyed. The frustration is beyond any level.

I don't know anything about the mod in question, but as far as I know Minecraft destruction is especially bad there because everything takes a long time to do, requires significant manual labor, and can not be automatically repaired.

None of these things are true in Factorio. In a proper mid-late game base any destruction should only result in some additional resource usage as your bots take inventory from storage or passive providers to automatically fix _everything_. The _worst_ case should be that you might have to use your personal roboport and walk to the scene if you don't provide your power plant with roboport coverage and sufficient supplies.

[MeduSalem]

The discussion about the explosion is still going?

It's a Steam Explosion... and the energy released in that explosion is enough to fracture all containment measurements and that's why the fallout of the reactor meltdown eventually gets spread everywhere.

Also in Chernobyl it wasn't only the 2 steam explosions themselves which caused that much fallout to half of Europe. It's true both explosions threw a lot of radioactive fuel and contaminated moderator material out of the reactor building to surrounding areas, but the bigger problem was that at first they didn't even realize the severity of the accident and left the exposed reactor core burn and radiate freely into the atmosphere for several days before they started dumping sand and other neutron-dampening stuff ontop of the exposed reactor. That they acted this delayed released much more radioactivity to the atmosphere than the initial Steam Explosions did.

[Grimakar]

So the big problem the incredibly careless player now has to suffer is not their base missing after a nuke happened, but a massive wave of incoming biters to their newly blacked out base with a reactor that is basically an immovable slag pile and a cloud of pollution that won't be going anywhere for a long while. Sounds a lot more like compelling gameplay than "You made a mistake, now you basically need to restart the game as you no longer have a base."

And that is exactly, how I want the penalty for nuclear energy to be.

[Andrzejef]

So the big problem the incredibly careless player now has to suffer is not their base missing after a nuke happened, but a massive wave of incoming biters to their newly blacked out base with a reactor that is basically an immovable slag pile and a cloud of pollution that won't be going anywhere for a long while. Sounds a lot more like compelling gameplay than "You made a mistake, now you basically need to restart the game as you no longer have a base."

And that is exactly, how I want the penalty for nuclear energy to be.

That, plus, let's not forget nuclear reactors are - most probably - supposed to be "high tech" stuff. As stated many times - high tech players will not even notice their base that wen't "pop" because of ever vigilant drones that will do their best to rebuild it the very instant big chunk of base disappeared, as items have no placing time.
A wave of biters - especially wave of biters fed with tons of polution over the time - is something every factory will notice, especially during blackout

[Marqee]

I've spent many hours playing.
From my tests i have never been in
1) lack of coal for my burners.
2) always been in lack of "crude oil" ( never used solid fuel )

I think some other changes rather then "burners optimizations with coal" should be done :

1) Some king of process that using "heat" and "coal" produces some "crude oil" / "petroleum gas"
2) A new kind of structure to produce power or heating water using "burnable oils"

[Mooncat]

I've spent many hours playing.
From my tests i have never been in
1) lack of coal for my burners.
2) always been in lack of "crude oil" ( never used solid fuel )

I think some other changes rather then "burners optimizations with coal" should be done :

1) Some king of process that using "heat" and "coal" produces some "crude oil" / "petroleum gas"
2) A new kind of structure to produce power or heating water using "burnable oils"

1) Klonan's Bergius Process can turn coal into oil products.
2) His KS Power provides new energy generators for different resources (mainly oil).

[MeduSalem]

1) Klonan's Bergius Process can turn coal into oil products.
2) His KS Power provides new energy generators for different resources (mainly oil).

The Bergius Process should have been in the game by default for several months now because it's a really good mod. I consider it almost official.

With Nuclear Power the problem of abundance coal will become even more noticable to people because of how they stock up on the stuff when they are not burning it in some back up boilers/steam engines etc. A way to get rid of the coal would be nice, so the Bergius Process would help because there's almost always a scarcity of Crude Oil.

[Koub]

1) Klonan's Bergius Process can turn coal into oil products.
2) His KS Power provides new energy generators for different resources (mainly oil).

The Bergius Process should have been in the game by default for several months now because it's a really good mod. I consider it almost official.

With Nuclear Power the problem of abundance coal will become even more noticable to people because of how they stock up on the stuff when they are not burning it in some back up boilers/steam engines etc. A way to get rid of the coal would be nice, so the Bergius Process would help because there's almost always a scarcity of Crude Oil.

Yeah. The problem is when you're playing for achievements, you can't use mods.

[MeduSalem]

Yeah. The problem is when you're playing for achievements, you can't use mods.

Yeah... which is why it should be included in Vanilla for those who like their achievements.

There's not really a good reason why it shouldn't be in the game... it doesn't even require much additional work... just copy&paste the 2 recipes from the mod to the base game and that's about it. Since Klonan is working at Wube anyways that shouldn't be a big deal.

[Mooncat]

Yeah. The problem is when you're playing for achievements, you can't use mods.

I just think the devs already have so many things to do. So if there is a mod that can solve the problem, better try it first.

Actually I haven't used Bergius Process and I don't think I will use it anyway, mainly because I use coal on trains and there are other mods to turn coal into other products.
I don't really think they will implement it into vanilla because that will make oil field obsolete.