Nuclear power in Factorio - clean or dirty?

[lancar]

Weather definitely needs to happen at some point, both to give more consequences to pollution and reducing the effectiveness of solars. Right now, energy is basically a non-issue after a certain point in the game. It should be a bit more complex than that.

[Kayser]

Adding weather effects or eclipses like that would probably be the best way to nerf solar power actually - I think the amount of power they produce at full available output is pretty alright. What the problem is in my opinion, is that because of the day/night cycle means that daytime (full brightness) is five times longer than night-time, and the solar panels operate at full efficiency during the day, and keep producing useful amounts of power well into dusk/dawn. I would change that so night is about the same length, the power output from panels drops more quickly during dusk. Add to that variable cloud cover, occasional storms, seasonal variation of day length and even smog from pollution and you can the panels reliability enough to be an effective nerf while adding a lot to the gameplay.

This is very good thinking.

[razorts]

Well there is absolutely no reason to use uranium for nuclear ENERGY unless you want to build nuclear WEAPONS, clean and efficient and more plentiful fuel for that is thorium, containment vessel operates under 1 atmosphere pressure unlike "standard" uranium fueled reactors which go 100-300 atmospheres. It cant explode, hence it cant pollute swats of land when reactors is breached and pressurized steam/gas explodes. Another strong point is that fuel doesnt need that expensive refining/enrichment process, you dig it out and its good to go and it can burn waste from standard reactors on top of that.

Thorium is as common as tin so there is plenty of it to go around,
it cant be weaponized,
salt reactors can burn spent nuclear fuel,
it operates at much higher temperatures so efficiency of steam turbines is higher,
Fuel efficiency is higher as well because of chemistry check the fission sequence for that.

so yeah its perfect

[XartaX]

Well there is absolutely no reason to use uranium for nuclear ENERGY unless you want to build nuclear WEAPONS, clean and efficient and more plentiful fuel for that is thorium, containment vessel operates under 1 atmosphere pressure unlike "standard" uranium fueled reactors which go 100-300 atmospheres. It cant explode, hence it cant pollute swats of land when reactors is breached and pressurized steam/gas explodes. Another strong point is that fuel doesnt need that expensive refining/enrichment process, you dig it out and its good to go and it can burn waste from standard reactors on top of that.

Thorium is as common as tin so there is plenty of it to go around,
it cant be weaponized,
salt reactors can burn spent nuclear fuel,
it operates at much higher temperatures so efficiency of steam turbines is higher,
Fuel efficiency is higher as well because of chemistry check the fission sequence for that.

so yeah its perfect

To be fair you can use Uranium just fine in a MSR, and it's also very efficient. We also have a lot of it (if we're talking about the fertile isotope), just like Thorium. It's just that we can use Thorium *too*, and there's a bunch of other benefits. But if you're actually looking at what happens in a LFTR, the Thorium is converted into Uranium in the core (or the blanket, to be more precise), which is then converted to energy(heat) & enough fissile material to keep the reaction going, iirc. There's no reason why you can't skip the tborium step (this is what gives LFTR the advantage that you can use it to decomission nuclear weaponry&nuclear "waste"), it just gives us more potential fuel to work with.

And you can weaponize thorium, it would just require an insane budget and be impossible to hide (edit: if it's used w/ a LFTR design, that is).

[razorts]

Good luck trying to weaponize thorium Trying to fission it to U235 would be pretty stupid thing to do as reaction byproducts are so radioactive that anyone nearby would boil instantly lol, or gamma radiation would kill him minutes later.

Anyway few videos advocating Thorium for energy generation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sG9_OplUK8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyqYP6f66Mw

[LordFedora]

Anything can be weaponized, hell i WAS going to go with just throwing it at them, but just make it so it splits in the general direction of "over there" and watch your enemies boil!

OT: we have a "clean" energy with solar (with the con of it being low amount) and we have a "dirty" power (that produces more)

my vote is that as cpy said, make it so it's polluting to manufacture it (say special machine that has a high pollution, or if doable a recipe that has pollution in it but the actual use of it is "clean"

[XartaX]

Good luck trying to weaponize thorium Trying to fission it to U235 would be pretty stupid thing to do as reaction byproducts are so radioactive that anyone nearby would boil instantly lol, or gamma radiation would kill him minutes later.

Anyway few videos advocating Thorium for energy generation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sG9_OplUK8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyqYP6f66Mw

I'm not sure why you're trying to argue me on this. First of all, from the Thorium fuel cycle it's U-233 you'd use for creating nukes. Secondly, it has already been done, as early as in 1955. It is very possible to do so. It is just, as I said, very expensive, as well as not terribly efficient because of U-232 contamination (but it's still a nuke... and you can get around that problem). Now, in a LFTR design you could set it up so proliferation isn't possible (which is a big selling point unless you actually want to produce nukes), but saying you can't develop nuclear weaponry from Thorium is ridiculous at best.

[UberWaffe]

tl;dr: Make nuclear power be a higher-tech, large scale, power producer. And make its waste actually useful. So reactor designs become a trade-off between clean power and useful waste.


As discussed on this thread, once solar power becomes something other than "once-off-resource-payment-for-effectively-permanent-power-generation" then I can really see a good use case for a fuel-based power source that is larger scale than steam power and also less polluting. (I like the idea that the reactor itself is clean, but pre- and post-processes aren't.)

What I would suggest is that instead of trying to 'force' the post-processing (i.e. the waste) somehow being permanent and polluting, I propose that the waste rather be useful.
For example: Give the user the ability to process the nuclear reactor waste into depleted uranium, which can be used for better cannon shells and gun bullets. And/Or the waste can be processed into mini nuke grenades or neutron x-ray cannon ammo. And/Or the waste can be processed into material used for higher tier modules.
Whatever may be.

Then, take the approach that a reactor can be designed in a modular way, with the design affecting the reactor's efficiency, capacity, usable fuels, and stability.

The user is then faced with the trade-off: Efficiency versus end products.
A very high efficiency reactor would have its fuel last magnitudes longer, but produce little to no waste whatsoever. So no neat new toys.
A very 'dirty' reactor, would require a constant feed of fuel (thus meaning a constantly running and large pre-processing chain, thus lots of pollution.) But it would quickly produce waste products that can be post-processed into toys.

Do I want to make a clean highly efficient LFTR reactor? Great, 100% efficiency and no waste!
Or do I want to make a Heavy Water Reactor? Great, only 1% efficiency, can only use fully refined fuel, but produces lots of waste. Now I get to use the waste to boil biters in their own shells with my new Neutron X-Ray death beam cannon.

Notes: Both a high and low efficiency design should be capable of producing lots of power, it is simply a matter of how quickly you burn through fuel, and how much juicy waste you get.
Efficiency: How quickly fuel burns up in the reactor. Does not affect actual power output.
Capacity: How many MW of heat the reactor generates per second. Assuming it is fully fueled.
Usable Fuels: The 'dirtier' the reactor type, the less types (isotopes and kinds) of fuel it can accept. Maybe still allow it to gunk it into waste, but without actually providing usable heat/power. (The aim is to make waste. We want that wonderful glow. THAT WONDERFUL GLOW!)
Stability: Basic reactor designs should be easy to implement, so everyone can get into it easily. Advanced reactor designs should be possible, but have a risk of being unstable, and therefore risk meltdown. But grant bonusses, such extra waste produced, or allowing more types of fuel to the bred into usable fuels. Whatever.

[XartaX]

Nuclear waste is simply contaminated fuel (usually solid, because you can just remove impurities from liquid). It's not really useful for anything in itself. It's simply that you can use up "the rest" of it in a MSR. Once you have access to MSR technology there is no reason whatsoever to create nuclear waste anymore. Imagine you can use up 0-100% of a fuel source. In old technology you use up, say, 3% of the fuel, so there's 97% left. But this contains impurities which make it unusable as a fuel source (or for anything else really). You could convert it to liquid fuel and use up close to all of the remaining 97% of the fuel. However, if you have access to MSR technology you could simply create liquid fuel out of the resource from the start, and use up all of the fuel in one go. If you can set up a chain reaction with a good enough neutron economy you could use byproducts to kickstart further reactors, or create nuclear weaponry. If you want to breed isotopes for nuclear weaponry you could do this in a properly designed "clean" reactor as well. It would actually be better at it than solid fuel reactors because you can use up more of the fuel, which generates byproducts assuming a >2 neutron economy (neutron economy of 2 == indefinite reaction as long as you keep supplying the reactor with fertile material. 3 for example would mean you get one "extra" neutron per reaction).

Edit: screw it, I'll try to explain neutron economy and fissile/fertile materials properly. Maybe it'll help you make some really good mechanics suggestions. Or maybe not, but at least I can say I tried :p

Fissile material is the kind of material that we actually want in terms of producing power. Per definition, it simply means a material that is capable of sustaining a nuclear fission reaction. This is also the kind of material we can make go boom as nuclear weaponry. All you do is supply it with a neutron, and it works its magic (well, it's not exactly that easy due to % chances a reaction will occur, but for the sake of explanation just assume it gets a neutron, then a reaction occurs). Old reactors essentially just shoveled fissile material into a reactor to sustain a nuclear reaction. The problem with this? Fissile material is rare as diamonds. We're literally burning diamonds as a fuel source.

Fertile material can't do anything on it's own. It does have one desirable property, though: you can "turn it into" fissile material by bombarding it with a neutron. The advantage of fertile material is that there's a LOT more of it on the planet (Thorium is an example here, which turns into U-233).

As for neutron economy. It simply means how many neutrons your reaction creates on average. If it produces 1, that's a bad economy. But you could use it to indefinitely sustain a reaction as long as you supply only Fissile material. The magic happens when you produce 2. Because now, after a reaction, you have 2 neutrons. You can use 1 to turn fertile material into fissile material, then the other one to use the fissile material itself (which creates energy/heat, and now you have 2 more neutrons). As you can see, you could now make a reactor which will run forever if you supply it with fertile material. However, it will still require a dose of fissile material to start up in the first place (this is why they say stuff like LFTR is expensive to set up, assuming we had everything else in order), as a reaction cannot occur directly using fertile material. A reactor with an economy of >2 is called a breeder reactor, because it can "breed" more fissile from the fertile material than it has to use up to sustain its reaction. Note: you actually want >2 (yes, it can be decimal, because it only refers to "on average") because of the % chance mentioned above.

So you have to separate a few things:
There's the "using fertile" vs "just using fissile" material reactors. Obviously we want to use reactors converting fertile material as we're going to run out of fissile material really fast. If you want to encourage this reality you could simply make it so when you mine Uranium you get an insane amount of fertile Uranium (>99%), and a small amount of fissile Uranium.
Then there's the liquid vs solid reactors. Liquid using up much more of the fuel (>99% vs <3% iirc). Obviously we want to use the liquid variant, both for efficiency and safety reasons.
But using either side of either of these does not prevent creating nuclear weaponry. I mean, you can process spent nuclear waste to get the stuff you need for nuclear weaponry, as per your idea (because it would contain some fissile material), but there's no real reason to just create lots of contaminated fuel when you can simply.. choose not to. Basically: it would be *extremely* inefficient use of the raw materials, you could simply remove the stuff from the reactors liquid fuel that you want to use (although the reactor would shut down unless your neutron economy is high enough to generate "spare" fissile material).

[MalcolmCooks]

Does nuclear weaponry even have a place in factorio?

[XartaX]

Does nuclear weaponry even have a place in factorio?

I don't see why not. You're in a gigantic wasteland where you don't have to think about civilian casualties, and there's a giant menace actively trying to kill you.

[Boogieman14]

Well, it also depends on the end goal. If the ultimate objective is to create a habitable planet for future generations of <whichever race the lone guy is>, nuclear weaponry may not be the best choice

[XartaX]

Well, it also depends on the end goal. If the ultimate objective is to create a habitable planet for future generations of <whichever race the lone guy is>, nuclear weaponry may not be the best choice

Nukes aren't that dangerous to the environment (long term) if you don't launch 999999 of them (e.g. MAD - mutually assured destruction).

[MalcolmCooks]

nuclear weapons are weapons of extreme mass destructions. Even the smallest yeild nuclear weapons created, like, nukes the size of a watermelon, are just too powerful to be used against biter nests. They would have a lethal blast area almost as big as the entire scannable range of a radar. Is that really necessary?

[XartaX]

nuclear weapons are weapons of extreme mass destructions. Even the smallest yeild nuclear weapons created, like, nukes the size of a watermelon, are just too powerful to be used against biter nests. They would have a lethal blast area almost as big as the entire scannable range of a radar. Is that really necessary?

Yes?;)

Also, it means you could introduce kaiju-level biters :p

[MalcolmCooks]

How rich do you have to set your deposits so that you don't need to expand into that mess until you can build a tank?

I concede my point, however. Small yeild nuclear artillery shells would be awesome.

[UberWaffe]

... Full explanation of Nuclear Life cycle...

I understand that nuclear waste is effectively useless and utterly undesirable in real life. And that useful isotopes of radioactive materials (such as those used in medical x-rays or nuclear density gauges) need to be specifically bred. Again, in real life.

I am not trying to belittle the complexity of nuclear physics, but simply making all the waste undesirable in the game would mean that the only design factor becomes fuel efficiency. There is no real trade off, just the same optimal design to always aim for.
If in the game a reactor produces only undesirable byproducts, then it is effectively the same as using loads of boilers (that only produce undesirable pollution as a byproduct), with perhaps the pollution per MW of heat generated and the fuel used being different.
I am merely suggesting a method by which (with some suspension of disbelief, I agree) the byproducts can rather be desirable, making for a new game play mechanic.

Does nuclear weaponry even have a place in factorio?

Full scale atomics? Probably not.
But depleted uranium slugs, nuclear fueled X-ray death beams, or science-fiction style laser gattling guns with fission batteries as ammo. Sure, why not?

But it need not only be weaponry. It could be things such as fission batteries for use in more advanced products.

[XartaX]

I realize that, but it should have a basis in reality. It's like making solar panels somehow desirable to use during the night. It doesn't make sense.

As I've said, I think you could have interesting fuel cycles without breaking suspension of disbelief to this degree (to anyone remotely knowledgeable about nuclear physics, at least ).

1) Early tech solid fuel reactors produce waste. The waste is not desirable, but you do not yet know how to make either liquid reactors, nor breeders. You'll dig up Uranium/Rare Earth Elements and can stockpile Thorium/fertile Uranium that you can not use yet. A small amount of what you dig up are fissile materials, though, which you can use in your solid fuel reactors, although you are limited in scale due to limited amount of fissile material, and you'll stockpile waste.

2) 2 tech branches: a) Molten Salt Reactors / b) Breeders
2a) Revamping your designs to use liquid fuel will let you use a lot more of the fuel (thus getting more energy for the amount you dig up, and generating less waste), but without breeder technology you're still limited to only directly using fissile materials.
2b) With breeder technology you can now create a blanket of fertile material in your reactor design which converts the fertile material into fissile material. This greatly increases your available fuel, since most of what you dig up are fertile materials. Without liquid fuel technology, though, you'll still produce great amounts of waste and thus have a lower fuel efficiency. More advanced techs could help improve the neutron economy and giving you access to more fissile material (which you can use for weaponry or starting more reactors).

3) more advanced tech could improve safety (no fukushima because a bunch of biters decided to take out your backup generators), improving the neutron economy beyond just generating enough neutrons to keep a reaction going (thus letting you proliferate for weaponry or other purposes), stuff like that.

Of course you can combine these technologies (LFTR).

[MalcolmCooks]

The option to use thorium fuel would be a good idea, but adding two new resource deposits just for nuclear power could be a bit much - perhaps they could both potentially be extracted from a single resource? There are minerals on earth that contain useful amounts of both thorium and uranium, so I don't think it's too far-fetched of an idea. Perhaps some quirk of geology on the factorio planet means that those ores are the richest or most abundant.

[roman566]

I wonder why everyone are fixated on fission power when there is better (and already available in the game) alternative? Namely, fusion power. It is present in the form of the Portable Fusion Reactor - expensive, generating no pollution and requiring no fuel. Just add another research topic to upscale it and you get your super reactor. No need to add new resources or anything. Sure, it would be expensive like hell but hey, nuclear power plants are like that. It would be a nice addition for those late game factories that have nothing to waste their resources on.