Factorio Forums

I suggest to add fusion reactors.

I have seen fusion reactors in power armors, so why i cant make big ones that will generate power for my factories ?

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What is my idea of the new electricity providing system ?

It would not use fuel. You would need to use water to cool it down.
It would produce radioactive waste. The waste would be indisposable because there is no use for it.
The waste will create massive pollution if not contained in special containers. The natives will target those containers to release the waste.

Fusion is a safe method of creating great amounts of power, for a low cost.

Safe - it is safe as long as it is properly maintained. Fusion reactor would explode if was overheated, dealing great damage to nearby buildings. The explosion radius expands if there were other fusion reactors in the area of the initial explosion. This would make the consequences of bad maintenance and heavily stacked reactors quite devastating. Making faraway outposts with those fusion reactors would be indeed one of good options or simply not stacking too many of them in one place. You could always make sure that nothing will go wrong with them by constructing some elaborate backup systems for water supply and waste disposal, just to ignore the dangers and safely stack up a lot of those reactors in one place. But the danger is always present if one of the subsystems fails - cooling system, waste disposal, reactor defenses.
Low cost - Considering that you need to spend resources to discover the technology that is required to unlock fusion reactors, i woudn't be all that sure it's low cost. Not to mention that you would need quite a bit of alien artifacts to craft one of the fusion reactors.

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What do we have now ?
As of now we have only 2 ways to generate electricity.
1. By using fuel.
2. By using day/night cycle.

Number 1 generates pollution but is very effective and we can insert different more effective fuels into the system.
Number 2 relies on capacitors to store energy for the duration of night. The big downside of solar panels is that both the panels and the capacitors take a lot of space. However they do not generate pollution.

And of course there is a third way, the mix of both systems. During the day you use massive solar plantations, during night the boilers kick in. You minimize the pollution by putting more capacitors but as you do that you get closer and closer to system number 2.
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I think that my idea of the fusion reactor adds new system to gain electricity from, compared to the existing ones.

search.php?keywords=fusion+reactor&term ... mit=Search
2 pages...
Useless to make a list.

The waste would be indisposable because there is no use for it.

This is not possible. The waste could be thrown into a chest, and simply destroyed out of existence. Factorio doesn't have any kind of real mechanic for toxic fallout, unless you consider standard pollution to be that kind of thing.

bobucles wrote:This is not possible. The waste could be thrown into a chest, and simply destroyed out of existence. Factorio doesn't have any kind of real mechanic for toxic fallout, unless you consider standard pollution to be that kind of thing.

Well, if you search for "Waste" you'll find some suggestions about an item-type, that cannot be destroyed in that way, but does a nice item-explosion instead.

Well, if you search for "Waste" you'll find some suggestions about an item-type, that cannot be destroyed in that way, but does a nice item-explosion instead.

Where there's a will, there's a player blowing up chests on an island to either block spawning, or to CTD the game as it spends the next 10 minutes looking for an available dumping site.

There just isn't a real mechanic to handle dangerous waste. Even waste item spam is kind of a moot point due to how simple it is to plop a few chests to gain thousands of spare inventory slots.

It becomes here off-topic.

We can discuss this in detail in another threads, but please read the other suggestions around waste/disposal etc.! Because there where some ideas around that, that are worth thinking about.

I somehow like the idea of creating energy and dealing with the fiddling parts afterwards. It is kinda like Steam engines but backwards.
But what i do not like is the idea of waste staying around.

If I have really time for it, I make a big list of suggestions, that handle the subject of energy creation. Until then you can also read viewtopic.php?f=9&t=5 which handles also most of the subjects.

Fusion reactors would be a great addition to the late game, but should require some additional infrastructure to not make them overpowered. Fusion reactors consume heavy water (deuterium and tritium) as fuel, which has to be extracted from water in special plants.

For the waste and pollution topic, IMHO fusion reactors should not create a large amount of pollution as they create no highly radioactive waste unlike nuclear plants.