Friday facts #151 - The plans for 0.14

[Durabys]

I have an idea for a Nuclear Power option:

Thunder Stone - Thorium and Rare Earth Mod:
viewtopic.php?f=94&t=23224

Unlike Uranium Thorium is abundant as Rare Earth element everywhere and so you do not need to find veins of the stuff on another continent. This means, you could make it part of the normal mining process of the other four solid resources you already mine. So no need to add yet ANOTHER resource. Make it just part of the mining process of Stone, for example. It would be a by-product of stone mining once you research the needed technologies to separate it.

Also, it is so easy-peasy to burn through in a nuclear fission reaction as a liquid Fluoride Salt. That means you won't need to put an entire chain of buildings that are for recycling or containment of Thorium by-products and radioactivate thrash.

[Proxy]

Woo! Nuclear Power
I assume Fission... with U-238, U-235, Pu-235, etc? xD

Not sure if it's gonna be one of Those Magical "BigReactors" Where you throw in Fuel and it Spits out Waste and Power without any Problem... eh, we'll see.
but pls don't make it Unrealistically Dangerous xD

(If there are gonna be RTG's i'm will do a Backflip.)

[Durabys]

Woo! Nuclear Power
I assume Fission... with U-238, U-235, Pu-235, etc? xD

Not sure if it's gonna be one of Those Magical "BigReactors" Where you throw in Fuel and it Spits out Waste and Power without any Problem... eh, we'll see.
but pls don't make it Unrealistically Dangerous xD

(If there are gonna be RTG's i'm will do a Backflip.)

Thorium. Let's have Thorium. Because unlike Uranium reactor, a LFTR (Lifter) reactor using LIquid Thorium Fluoride as a fuel, can 'burn down' 95% of its fissionable energy. Uranium can do only 5% and then you get fissile products that have a half-time of 30+ thousand years. Thorium by-products have a lifetime of 200+ years.

[AssaultRaven]

On the subject of response time, note that while commercial reactors are used as baseline generators, this is not an inherent property of nuclear power, but is done to economize on plant components by minimizing thermal cycling. Any plant in which reactor power follows steam demand will quickly and automatically match the power output being drawn from it, with the stored energy in the coolant loops and/or steam generators providing a large buffer to smooth out the mismatch.

It would be annoying if someone who is already going thru the trouble of designing and building a nuclear power plant from scratch would not choose a design suited for their needs.

Also, I note that the current US practice with nuclear submarines is to simply cut the reactor compartment out, seal it, and bury it. This kind of mindset makes me think that reactors made with highly enriched fuel could simply be retired-in-place where they were built. It doesn't produce any pollution so biters should leave it alone anyway. On the other hand, the lifetime of such a reactor would be measured in years, even at full power. Hat tip to the devs if they actually track that and 5 years from now a factory that's been running since .14 suddenly goes dark.

[safan]

Why are developers spending time for something that can be perfectly done with a mod?

Please concentrate on providing things that can't be modded:

- new map with overlays (power, logistic networks, ores etc)

- new world generation with rivers, mountains, hills besides the neverending lakes and plains we have now

- new possibilities to interact with the new terrain elements: (ships on the water, mines under the mountains, terraforming from hills to plains)

- new enemy selection to match new terrain (aquatic, flying, burrowing)

kind regards

[AssaultRaven]

Why are developers spending time for something that can be perfectly done with a mod?

Please concentrate on providing things that can't be modded:

- new map with overlays (power, logistic networks, ores etc)

- new world generation with rivers, mountains, hills besides the neverending lakes and plains we have now

- new possibilities to interact with the new terrain elements: (ships on the water, mines under the mountains, terraforming from hills to plains)

- new enemy selection to match new terrain (aquatic, flying, burrowing)

kind regards

By that reasoning, they could make it open source and then not do any more work whatsoever. "It can be done with a fork!"

Or just not have written anything at all and when you buy it they send a link to C++ tutorials.

[Durabys]

Idea for Nuclear. Different mechanic than what's been suggested so far.

My idea takes inspiration from the 'Thorium Molten Salt Reactor' craze going about (yes it's a good idea, but also yes there are some fundamental problems with it).

Basically U-233 fissions, neutron hits Thorium atoms, Thorium turns into Plutonium, then eventually fissions into Uranium-233 (or something like that). Fuel cycle requires U233 to get going, but it acts as a catalyst after that, in that the U233 is produced at a slightly higher rate than is consumed, and basically replaces/breeds itself.

This is the interesting part. You need a minimum amount of U233 to make the reactor work, but IRL breeding U233 is an incredibly slow process. We're talking years to double the amount you have. So scaling up such a thing takes a long time.

That's your mechanic - needing to breed fuel over a long time. Make nuclear so great and compact that everyone should WANT to move to it, but make scaling up nuclear a very slow, deliberate process they need to invest time in.

:::Example system::::

Add an Ore Processing Plant that consumes 10MW and takes in, say 50 stone ore and outputs 1 Thorium (say, 5GJ energy content, net 3.2GJ. 1 stack of coal = 400MJ for reference) after 180 seconds and also advanced a production-module-esque bar by, say 1%. When that bar gets full, a single U233 item also pops out. Being fed continuously, it would take 5 hours to generate that first U233 ore - can't short cut it either since you can't produce a single item double-fastwith multiple plants.

Add a nuclear power plant - it consumes 1 Thorium and 1 U233 over 100 seconds, producing 50MW. It also outputs a U233 (replacement), and advances a bar to generate an addition U233 by 10%. So this single plant will generate an addition U233 every 1000 seconds - or every ~16 minutes. So after 16 minutes you can start up another power plant, and then you can start up two reactors after another 16 minutes, and so on and so forth. Plus whatever all your Ore Processing Plants churn out. A 5GW power grid would take 100 plants, or about 7 quarter-hour-doublings, and net-consume 50 stone/second.

You could implement this all right now, with the only limitation being the need to output multiple items (or do manufacturing plants processing crude oil barrels already do that? maybe no coding-work needed.)

:::End example:::


You can futz with the numbers and everything to get the kind of production/progression curve you want, but that's the general gist. You make a Breeder Program. Long prep-time, slow-but-exponential buildup and payoff. It requires the player to make a large investment and aggressively mine and transport stone (50 stone/sec will require mining a lot of different average-sized stone patches simultaneously). It rewards players for stockpiling the mountains of Thorium they're going to generate before they can start using it, which also messes a bit with the min/maxers in that a specific ratio of power plants to ore-processors doesn't make as much sense. It provides a very large, slow-burning, compact power source. And once the player establishes their nuclear industry, they'll eventually have more U233 than they know what to do with. Now they can plop down a few power plants and a box of thorium anywhere without giving it a second thought, and power outposts indefinitely. Post-energy-scarcity world.



Anyway, that's the idea. Anyone have any refinements to add?

Edit - just thought of my own refinement. Coal becomes mostly worthless once you have nuclear, and it's far more abundant than stone. Use coal in the ore processing plants instead - makes everything cleaner.
Edit 2 - Add nuclear trains, and other such things. Takes 1 U233 and runs on Thorium. This gives a reason to keep up with collecting U233, and gives more advantages to a Nuclear Plant. No more train refueling etc. Single thorium would be equal to 12.5 stacks of coal. Stack of Thorium would be like 500 stacks of coal. Screw having to manage refueling a complex train network ever again. You can make this a general trend - the nuclear plants are the initial goal, but the U233 breeding infrastructure is the real prize.

You realize someone could modify this to model how your idea would work out:
Thunder Stone - Thorium and Rare Earth Mod:
viewtopic.php?f=94&t=23224

Factorio Mods link

Thunder Stone - Basic Thorium and Rare Earth Mod (Initial Alpha)

I saw that there was a uranium mod already out there, and since thorium > uranium in every way bar atomic number, I decided to make a thorium mod.

Features

New ore: monazite, rarer than copper but not as rare as oil. Bright green in Factorio. Not bright green in real life (proving that, if there is a Creator, he/she/it can be boring sometimes).
Two new metals: Thorium and Rare Earth, both obtained by combining monazite ore and sulphuric acid in a chemical plant. Note: monazite cannot be smelted.
Thorium reactor: specifically a liquid fuel thorium reactor. Acts as a boiler by converting liquid thorium fuel (made from thorium metal and water) and normal water to produce boiling water, which can then be used in steam engines. Thorium reactors do not produce any pollution.
Rare earth: Advanced Circuits and Processor Units now require 1 rare earth metal plate each.

The thorium reactor, along with the monazite/thorium processing recipes, are unlocked with the Thorium Processing technology, which requires 100 red and green science packs and prior knowledge of Fluid Handling.



Credit to Klonan for the oil steam boiler that forms the basis of the thorium reactor, and to DaveMcW for pointing me in the direction of Klonan's resource at the crucial moment.

[devenv]

Hmmm... I would solve the multi-threading differently - by making an entities graph with the relationships between them (what can affect what, reversed edges directions) and processing the leaves first in parallel, propagating the results to parents and removing them, then recursion... This will allow you to process other entities too, not only inserters etc...

Disabling train stations - YESSSSS!!!

[ketil]

If the calculations are simple enough, then you could offload some of the work to the GPU, even integrated graphics has more execution units than the CPU.

I see 12 squares with the same number in a 32x32 block. While I see 12 threads like this as unproblematic when done right even on a single core, I don't think limiting yourself to 12 necessarily is a good idea either. You could just as well make an iterator over all interesting squares which gives you only 1-squares, and each time a thread is done, it takes a new square from that iterator and does stuff. When the 1-squares are all done you start iteration over the 2-squares etc. How many of the same type you do at once easily scale based on the amount of threads in the pool, and that could depend on the CPU and maybe the OS as well because the context switchers are different.

[Zeblote]

If the calculations are simple enough, then you could offload some of the work to the GPU, even integrated graphics has more execution units than the CPU.

I see 12 squares with the same number in a 32x32 block. While I see 12 threads like this as unproblematic when done right even on a single core, I don't think limiting yourself to 12 necessarily is a good idea either. You could just as well make an iterator over all interesting squares which gives you only 1-squares, and each time a thread is done, it takes a new square from that iterator and does stuff. When the 1-squares are all done you start iteration over the 2-squares etc. How many of the same type you do at once easily scale based on the amount of threads in the pool, and that could depend on the CPU and maybe the OS as well because the context switchers are different.

I don't think the 12 has any meaning here, in a large map you'd have thousands of those chunks which each have an area with number 1.

[Woodmn]

Note: Sorry for the wall of text...
Regarding the Nuclear power, and considering that every factory's on-hand supplies and power needs will be different, would it be possible that it could be implemented like the 'big reactors mod' for minecraft? With the ability to build different types of reactor using different materials to change how it will function? Even if its still limited to a hand full of designs that all look visually the same but have differing efficiency's and power output depending on what is put into it?

Some form of nuclear fuel, potentially refined from either *insert nuclear isotope here* ore or that dirty ore that you are thinking of implementing (this way, assuming dirty ore is a late game thing, would make nuclear power a late game, large quantity power producer allowing for valuable space to be used for factory over solar farms) would need to be constantly collected, refined and fed to the reactor or it will shut down.

Coolant could be produced using chemical plants then either have to pump it into the reactor through specific ports or barrel it then put the barrels of coolant into the rector. The barrels could either be destroyed or output for reuse. But occasionally the reactor would produce a barrel of nuclear waste. This barrel could then have several uses.
eg; refining it into higher quality nuclear fuel. Higher quality reactor parts which, when the original parts are replaced with the better parts, could either allow for better reactors or upgrade the current design. Conversion into 'nuclear fuel cells' which could either be used as a better form of power production in power armor or fuel for vehicles with a huge amount of energy (think Gj). If you wanted to you could also allow these to be refined into nuclear weapons that do massive damage to a large area but leave the land 'scarred' and will produce massive pollution and slowly inflict damage to the player (this could decay over time or be blocked by shields).

Another addition could be high pressure pipes (pipes, steel and plastic?) which can store 20+ fluid units a pipe and transmit fluids better as well as using high pressure pumps that can fill a normal pipe on its own or partially fill a high pressure pipe. Using these pipes a nuclear reactor could just produce massive quantity's of 'high pressure steam' (requiring the upgraded pipes) that could either be sent to huge steam engine set ups (as an early replacement of coal power while the reactors are still pretty bad) or varying levels of steam turbines that produce way more power.

The reactor could also be used for nuclear medicine, with either smaller reactor setups or a specific module capable of producing nuclear medicine. A 1x2/2x2 module in power Armour would automatically use the nuclear medicine to; combat radiation sickness (if you add the nuclear weapons) or heal the player both manually or automatically through the module. It could also potentially give you minor stat buffs so you can run faster and resist damage better.

No idea how hard this would be to implement (the poker, sudoku and connect four that some of my classmates are programming for IPT seems painful enough) coding wise but some form of modular buildings could allow for several other buildings to be produced (an idea I would love would be a kind of 'pile' storage like they use for coal and ore at docks for massive ore, coal and possibly basic material storage with multiple high capacity inputs and outputs (think that full belt compression loader/unloader from a few moths ago) so belts could have more use). But again, I have no clue what you guys have to put up with when designing these things.

Ps, if one of the devs happens to have read this far, could you possibly implement several pipes/valves for dealing with fluids? Even if it's just a one way pipe or valve like a pipe version of the switch, it could make fluids easier to work with.

PPs, sorry for the wall of text, the idea just kept growing.

PPPs, with the dirty ore, dirty *specific* ore -wash plant-> specific ore and/or nuclear ore -refining-> nuclear fuel

[Woodmn]

Woo! Nuclear Power
I assume Fission... with U-238, U-235, Pu-235, etc? xD

Not sure if it's gonna be one of Those Magical "BigReactors" Where you throw in Fuel and it Spits out Waste and Power without any Problem... eh, we'll see.
but pls don't make it Unrealistically Dangerous xD

(If there are gonna be RTG's i'm will do a Backflip.)

Thorium. Let's have Thorium. Because unlike Uranium reactor, a LFTR (Lifter) reactor using LIquid Thorium Fluoride as a fuel, can 'burn down' 95% of its fissionable energy. Uranium can do only 5% and then you get fissile products that have a half-time of 30+ thousand years. Thorium by-products have a lifetime of 200+ years.

@Durabys Yes but did you take into account newer 4th generation reactors that are coming onto the scene? A personal favorite is the uranium salt reactor concept that theoretically means that you can just refine the fuel every couple of years and put the fissile wast and reaming fuel back into it, topping up the fuel as you do so, an almost infinite number of times.

On a side note, I partially agree with the whole fuel in -> massive power out being silly, but there should at least be a basic reactor that is highly inefficient and doesn't produce a lot of power but works on this idea for early power production. IF the devs follow an idea where the reactor produces waste that has uses for later reactors/other processes then this reactor could get you started.

[Requia]

On the subject of response time, note that while commercial reactors are used as baseline generators, this is not an inherent property of nuclear power, but is done to economize on plant components by minimizing thermal cycling.

It can be done if necessary and planned for but there are good reasons not to. In a fossil fuel plant operating costs are closely linked to how much the fuel costs. Nuclear fuel is quite expensive (more because of the massive industrial enrichment process and expensive security associated with it* than the cost of Yellowcake) But nuclear load following prematurely ruins fuel elements, so there's no good reason to do it if there's something else to throttle, and some reactor designs simply can't., France does it a lot because they have no fossil fuel plants to throttle (they also sell a lot of cut rate electric to their neighbours to avoid wasting money by throttling).

*Biters should try and steal your nuclear fuel because they're too stupid to realize they can't build bombs with it, realism! (no).

[Requia]

Response to various: I don't think Thorium would be as fun for gameplay purposes. In the real world one of the things that makes Thorium amazing is that you can refine it from nonfissile to fissile inside the reactor itself, there's no expensive enrichment process that produces dangerous chemical waste (no really fancy tank shells either though). For gameplay purposes though, I really think part of the cost of nuclear should be the need to set up a big gas centrifuging assembly that makes the fuel, instead of just 'mine it and put it in a boiler'.


Further thoughts on nuclear: Nuclear reactors are actually cheap. Everything that attaches to a reactor is amazingly expensive.

[TheUnknown007]

Ps, if one of the devs happens to have read this far, could you possibly implement several pipes/valves for dealing with fluids? Even if it's just a one way pipe or valve like a pipe version of the switch, it could make fluids easier to work with.

This already exists: liquids will only move one way in a small pump, even if it is unpowered. I think liquids may not flow through a pump at all when it is unpowered, so you could use it as a switch by enabling / disabling (or powering, unpowering) it.

[basfot]

Like many posts in this thread i also have a suggestion for the nuclear power. Although with a little diffrent approach that hopefully make it an interesting choice and a competitor to current sources and not a replacement.

Pros and Cons with current power sources:
Steam: cheap to build,steady, pollutes, requires upkeep.
Solar: expensive to build, no upkeep, no power at night, takes up alot of space

Suggested pros and cons for nuclear:
Nuclear: medium build cost, no upkeep, pollutes alot if missmanaged (a little less if done properly)

So here´s how it would work in practise:
-Deuterium is generated by processing water in a filtration building (resulting Deuterium is a fluid and requires alot of water to process)
-Nuclear fuel is generated in an air filtration units (resulting fuel is solid and are made by radioactive particals in the air)
-Deuterium and nuclear fuel is used in a nuclear plant to generate power and nuclear waste (Available early in game. Nuclear waste is a solid and slowly generates pollution whereever it is)
-Waste storage unit reduce generated pollution by waste inside (requires mid game tech and reduction is possibly increased by tech)
-Waste disposal building destroys waste and generates some pollution (requires late game tech and cost alot)

How it would be used:
Early game:
Compared to steam, nuclear produces alot more power without upkeep but cost alittle more to setup.

Mid game:
The buildup of waste start to generate alot of pollution. quickly build storage units or be overrun by angry evolved biters.
Starting nuclear mid game offers a cheaper and more stable source of power than solar while still getting the benefit of not spending coal.

Late game:
The mountain of waste need to be taken care of before pollution gets completly of the charts. Investments to the expensive disposal build should be number one priority. while burning of to much as once could trigger som nasty biter attacks (due to pollution generated at destruction)
Starting Nuclear late game should offer a energy source with a cost comparable to solar (no waste mountain= not as many disposal buildings)

Super late game:
waste generated should go directly to disposal by now, generated pollution is higher than coal but requires no upkeep, slightly lower cost compared to solar

Justifications:
-Why allow nuclear so early? To give an early alternative to steam.
-Why getting fuel for "free"(not a resource needing mining)? Mostly for balancing it compared to other sources. Also the engineer have a protection suit which could indicate the air being fill with radioactive particles.
-Why deuterium? Very usefull properities for usage in nuclear processes. Also the game is in need for a lakeside filled with offshore pumps
-Other stuff? well to tired to write about it now.

Other:
high concentrations of waste could be used to lure natives to attack specific locations where strong defences are located.

Sorry about the english, i´m not a native english speaker.

[Zulan]

If the calculations are simple enough, then you could offload some of the work to the GPU, even integrated graphics has more execution units than the CPU.

I strongly doubt the problem fits well to GPUs. It's not about the bulk of arithmetic operations but rather complex control flows and irregular memory manipulation. All things that GPUs don't do very well.

[Durabys]

Woo! Nuclear Power
I assume Fission... with U-238, U-235, Pu-235, etc? xD

Not sure if it's gonna be one of Those Magical "BigReactors" Where you throw in Fuel and it Spits out Waste and Power without any Problem... eh, we'll see.
but pls don't make it Unrealistically Dangerous xD

(If there are gonna be RTG's i'm will do a Backflip.)

Thorium. Let's have Thorium. Because unlike Uranium reactor, a LFTR (Lifter) reactor using LIquid Thorium Fluoride as a fuel, can 'burn down' 95% of its fissionable energy. Uranium can do only 5% and then you get fissile products that have a half-time of 30+ thousand years. Thorium by-products have a lifetime of 200+ years.

@Durabys Yes but did you take into account newer 4th generation reactors that are coming onto the scene? A personal favorite is the uranium salt reactor concept that theoretically means that you can just refine the fuel every couple of years and put the fissile wast and reaming fuel back into it, topping up the fuel as you do so, an almost infinite number of times.

Nope. They still require a MASSIVE amount of fuel disposal, servicing and legacy technologies. Anything using Uranium does. China and India are currently building SEVERAL Thorium reactors and are abandoning nearly every other 4th gen effort but Thorium.

Short youtube video on LFTR, explained in 5 minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY

BTW? LFTR reactros? Are a design made in the late fucking 1950's..during the Atom Craze! They are old as dirt. They weren't used because when the paper concerning the project got onto POTUS Nixon's table he cancelled the project because the reactor CANNOT BE USED TO MAKE BOMB MATERIAL. I repeat: It is physically impossible to build nukes with this thing. Which would still allow you to have Uranium in the game because you would need Breeder reactors for bombs.

[Requia]

So here´s how it would work in practise:
-Deuterium is generated by processing water in a filtration building (resulting Deuterium is a fluid and requires alot of water to process)
-Nuclear fuel is generated in an air filtration units (resulting fuel is solid and are made by radioactive particals in the air)
-Deuterium and nuclear fuel is used in a nuclear plant to generate power and nuclear

Deuterium is not a nuclear fuel (I mean, it's a hypothetical fusion fuel but I assume the devs are planning on fission, at leas initially, as D-Li6 cycle fuel plants fusion plants can't be built below the GWe range even in theory). What it is is a nuclear moderator in the form of heavy water (water made with Deuterium instead of regular Hydrogen) and coolant. It isn't necessary to making a nuclear reactor, many many reactors use regular water, or gas cooling and a carbon moderator, or even no moderator at all in a handful of cases. Heavy water actually *is* a good idea in my mind, how I'd set it up (not really realistic but good gameplay) is for light water reactors to be less powerful/fuel efficient than heavy water reactors.

[Durabys]

So here´s how it would work in practise:
-Deuterium is generated by processing water in a filtration building (resulting Deuterium is a fluid and requires alot of water to process)
-Nuclear fuel is generated in an air filtration units (resulting fuel is solid and are made by radioactive particals in the air)
-Deuterium and nuclear fuel is used in a nuclear plant to generate power and nuclear

Deuterium is not a nuclear fuel (I mean, it's a hypothetical fusion fuel but I assume the devs are planning on fission, at leas initially, as D-Li6 cycle fuel plants fusion plants can't be built below the GWe range even in theory). What it is is a nuclear moderator in the form of heavy water (water made with Deuterium instead of regular Hydrogen) and coolant. It isn't necessary to making a nuclear reactor, many many reactors use regular water, or gas cooling and a carbon moderator, or even no moderator at all in a handful of cases. Heavy water actually *is* a good idea in my mind, how I'd set it up (not really realistic but good gameplay) is for light water reactors to be less powerful/fuel efficient than heavy water reactors.

Isn't deuterium used as coolant, moderator and heat transfer medium in some high pressure reactors?