Nuclear Balancing and fun Stuff

[Cagbee]

Nuclear power is something that once I get going is almost too easy for me to forget about. I always have it in a corner in my base that's out of the way and I only really come by to build another reactor. Nuclear Warheads are a bit tricky to use as the explosion often, but not always kills me. But spamming them seems to be the most effective way to clear an area of enemies and trees. So I had some ideas to shake up nuclear power and are in no particular order.

Nuclear radiation: A special type of pollution that is released when you use a nuclear missile, when a reactor goes critical or super critical, or when a player or biological entity gets to close to Fallout or handles spent nuclear fuel (more on this later). I imagine it being 10 times as effective as regular pollution in causing bitter evolution and when high enough can begin to damage the player, unless they have shield on or it can by pass shields to make it extra deadly. As time passes it will A) disperse to non-detectable levels and B) when there is large enough concentration cause fallout.

Nuclear Fallout: Fallout IRL is the radiation contaminated dust that settles after a nuclear incident and can cause long term health problems, when Nuclear radiation is in high enough concentration it will collect on the ground mostly concentrated near the cause of radiation and spread out in an area that is greater than the explosion itself. This would make nuke spamming more messy, as one can imagine, and be an absolute pain to clean, almost requiring you to use robots to clean it up. But even they maybe damaged by radiation and would need to return to base to heal before continuing cleaning up your ill-gotten gains.

Critical and Super-critical events: These would only happen when a new nuclear fuel is put into a reactor, where there is a large spike in heat energy that if not released or captured will cause the reactor to go critical or if not dealt with in correct amount of time, super-critical. If you could imagine for a second an ideal nuclear setup with one reactor that is converting all of its energy into steam its at 100% effectivity, but when a critical event happens it will temporarily spike to 150% effectivity. If the player cannot capture this energy by adding more heat exchangers and turbines it will begin to release radiation and fallout until dealt with. Further if it is already at a critical state and the reactor goes through another criticality event it will go into a state of super-criticality at 200% or above effectivity and release a greater amount of radiation and fallout until the fuel is spent and then it will explode! Of course when interacting with other rectors it will spread its energy to other rectors, so if one of two reactors has a critical event each reactor will be at 125% effectivity, and when a rector goes through a criticality event again it then go critical at 150% effectivity. This effect will scale with the number of attached reactors. But going back to my one reactor setup if you over build the setup by a small bit, adding only one more heat exchanger and subsequent turbines putting it at below 100% effectivity, say as an example 90% effectivity, and this reactor goes through a criticality event it will initially go to 140% effectivity, and then decay until it reaches its normal output at 90% effectivity.