[0.14] Nuclear reactor as part of advanced steam setup

[The_Mell]

Nuclear reactor becomes part of an advanced steam setup that features superheated steam, advanced boilers, steam turbines and cooling towers.

Advanced Steam.jpg (58.11 KiB) Viewed 4992 times

For me a nuclear reactor is nothing more than a huge boiler. So it's only logically to make it a part of already existing steam setup.
The problem is of course that just adding another heating option is a little bit lame, so let's supersize things.
I would like to see another 'tier' of steam based power production which utilizes superheated steam at for example 400° to be used in steam turbines.
And what would be a nuclear power plant without those cooling towers? But this would need some type of used steam, still hot but not any more usable in steam engines or turbines, which i call here "old steam".

Changed resources: max water temperature is raised from 100° to 400°
New resource: "old steam"
New Buildings:

• Advanced boiler: heats water up to 400°, burns all kind of solid fuels and oil based fuels
• Nuclear Reactor: heats water up to 400°, burns radioactive fuels
• Steam turbine: uses 400° water to generate electric power, has option to generate "old steam" or higher pollution
• Cooling tower: uses "old steam" to generate water of maybe 80°

[BlakeMW]

What I'd like as a minimum is a chain along the lines of:

Water -> |Nuclear Reactor| -> Superheated Steam -> |Turbine| -> Steam -> |Condenser| -> Water

Two essential components, I would consider to be heat exchangers and setups that can recycle working fluid instead of consuming it, for example taking in steam at 400C and outputting steam at 100C. If the setup can be "smart" enough to recognize that a condenser improves turbine efficiency then all the better, but I wouldn't regard that as essential, merely nice to have (also the condenser could be built into the turbine).

Even if the base game doesn't explore the full complexity that these features could allow, like complex heat exchange loops involving liquid metal cooling the reactor and transferring heat to water for use in turbines, it would be nice if the basic functionality were there which modders could then build upon to make fantastically complex power generation.

Incidentally we can kind of do heat exchangers at the moment using a recipe along the lines of "hot oil + cold water -> cold oil + hot water" or scripting which transfers heat between fluid boxes, but it'd be nice to have a machine which exchanges heat in a continuous manner without the performance hit of scripting. And of course a power generator which takes in hot liquid and outputs cold liquid instead of consuming liquid (but only working in a given temperature range, being destroyed by too-hot liquid and letting too-cold liquid just flow through) would open up many possibilities. Some kind of "void pump" like an offshore pump which works in reverse, dumping any fluid which enters it, would also be a useful component though those are quite doable already (if a little clunky).

[Optera]

When going nuclear we should be forced to make the inner cycle, the one where fluids come in contact with radioactive material, closed or suffer from extreme radiation pollution.
It might be a fun thing to simply dump the contaminated water in a lake and check for 3 eyes fish.

[MadZuri]

I like it so far. I gotta say tho, I'm concerned about the fuel cycle. As a former nuclear reactor operator, and nuclear engineering student (long story), I really dislike how the mods that handle nuclear power behave.

It involves some astrophysics. There is an incredibly slim chance that some random planet we find will have EXACTLY the same isotope abundance as the earth, but every single mod treats it as identical as earth. If the star system is a little bit younger, there would be so much U235 that you wouldn't need to enrich it, and if it was a little older, there wouldn't be enough U235 for enrichment to be possible.

For game mechanics, you should be able to pull uranium from coal and thorium from stone. Uranium would be used to build the reactor (you need a seed of uranium to get it started) and a then a constant stream of thorium (or uranium) to keep it running.

Yes, this is incredibly simplified, but hopefully more balanced toward gameplay. It just bothers me more than it should that the mod authors think it's even possible for a random planet to have exactly the same enrichment as earth, and that in this universe, they would use exactly the same tech we used in 1970's earth. I mean, good that you know your tech history, but too "realistic" is sometimes a bad thing.

[siggboy]

MadZuri, are you trolling? Realism in Factorio?

This is about getting a more complex and interesting way to make energy, who even cares if a planet with enough U235 is realistic? As an aside, all the elements heavier than Fe are the result of breeder reactions inside stars (that went nova and distributed their contents to the galaxy), why shouldn't they be roughly equally distributed among the planets that are dense enough to form Earth-like planets? The planet that Factorio takes place on (its name is "Oirotcaf", BTW) is precisely old enough for the precise amount of Uranium that makes the game balanced; otherwise the game wasn't balanced, it's the Anthropic Principle.

If it bothers you that Uranium abundance is not realistic, why aren't you bothered by Copper abundance (OK, maybe you are)? That's a lot more common than it should be when you take planet Earth as a model.

I'd be happy with an advanced reactor that takes F.A.I.R.Y. D.U.S.T. (a fictitional element that I've just invented), as long as the process involved makes for interesting gameplay.

The Nucular mod does a fine job with the processing/reprocessing/breeding chain -- anything like it would already be great in the Vanilla game. The steam heating/cooling proposed by OP also looks really nice, maybe it should be incorporated into Nucular.

[steinio]

F.A.I.R.Y. D.U.S.T.

[MadZuri]

Lol, no, I'm not trolling. I'd rather it be just magic dust that works. My complaint was that some people want it super-realistic, but miss the point that to use the exact same tech as 1970's nuclear they have to make a LOT of unrealistic assumptions.

Copper abundance doesn't bother me, and neither does infinite energy belts and offshore pumps. Magic rocks that you unlock through tech that you put in a really expensive machine? Totally fine with that. The exact same refining process that was specific to the Manhattan Project? Nope.

[MeduSalem]

I somehow find The_Mell's approach not that bad after all... it's a good start that could be developed into something that looks like fun. Though I never really looked into how all the mods are doing it, so I can't say anything about them.
At least I think the above concept covers the part for the fluid (water/steam) processing/reprocessing quite well indeed.


As for how to get radioactive material... did anyone ever think about that it could be a part of the dirty ore concept? That dirty ore could be split into regular ore and some percentage of radioactive elements?
Don't know how much fun that would be but from there it could be picked up and go through enrichment cycles before it can be used as fuelrods in the Nuclear reactor.


And as third part the player should have to deal with the radioactive waste material of the reactors.


So in my opinion the Nuclear stuff should be one of the most complicated things in the game to set up (more complicated than Oil Industry) for the benefit of producing a lot of power very densely. Should be somewhere in the league of the production chain all 4 Science packs require or the production chain leading up to finally launching Rockets. So absolutely late game.

[The_Mell]

At least I think the above concept covers the part for the fluid (water/steam) processing/reprocessing quite well indeed.

That's what it is.

Originally i wanted to post a complete concept for nuclear power but then i decided to go small, split things up and start with the easy and good looking part.
I believe different aspects could and maybe even should be argued separately.
For me those aspects would be:

• Power Conversion
• Life of Resource
• Radioactivity

First i showed here. Second would be the way from ore to waste and third how pollution and maybe damage become part of game mechanics.