Uranium Power

[kinnom]

will you add fusion resctors, plutonium and thorium?

[Fatmice]

Yes, they are on my list of things to-do. I'm just busy with my PhD work at the moment.

Fusion will be based on NIF since I think that is easier to implement. The plutonium will be part of 0.7 when I release fuel decay and fuel breeding. Thorium will be in 0.8 where it is going to be a MSR. It will need the breeding code from 0.7 and a whole fluid processing line to work right.

[cpy]

Yes, they are on my list of things to-do. I'm just busy with my PhD work at the moment.

Fusion will be based on NIF since I think that is easier to implement. The plutonium will be part of 0.7 when I release fuel decay and fuel breeding. Thorium will be in 0.8 where it is going to be a MSR. It will need the breeding code from 0.7 and a whole fluid processing line to work right.

Are you doing PhD in physics or something lol?

[Fatmice]

Haha, no I'm a biochemist. I have dedicated next week to work on this mod. Hopefully something good will come out of it.

[Taelyn]

The fuel assembly in the chest for the reacter do they get used?

[Fatmice]

Not yet, in the next version they will be consumed.

[dog_365]

do you have an idea when 0.7 wil come out

[Fatmice]

Code base for 0.7 is being worked on. I have not release it yet because I'm waiting for some functional changes in 0.13. Also, 0.7 will not be compatible with 0.6.x due to some fundamental changes to the reactor and its auxiliary buildings. I expect quite a few other popular mod will also break when 0.13 comes out so it will be a good time to start a new game anyway. Thus I'm holding 0.7 close to me for now.

Some expected/up-in-the-air changes I'm working on.

1. Code optimization: There are several aspects to this.
   1. I do not expect people to build the reactor farms, but if they do then the current implementation is seriously lacking in tick optimization. Part of this is due to how .energy must be modified on each tick. The 0.13.x experimental release is supposed to allow .energy of a variable size. This allows one to extrapolate the energy output needed to maintain a reactor temperature for any quantity of time and modify .energy in this way.
   2. Subscription based code evaluation instead of a rote for-loop execution on each function at some time interval. This requires rewrite of much of my code.
   3. Buff the reactor performance so people will build less but more powerful reactors. This will help with reactor proliferation and ultimately lua calls, which is damn slow.
2. Reactor changes:
   1. It is unclear at the moment whether the reactor will remain a boiler or switch to an assembler type. The reason for this is it is unclear if variable .energy will be a feature on day-one of 0.13.x experimental release. Furthermore, the inclusion of temperature in the recipe will also be a feature of 0.13, but that too is up-in-the-air and I do not know when that feature will be added. If the reactor stays as a boiler, then reactor .energy optimization will only be effective if .energy is of variable size. If the reactor changes to an assembler type, then the recipe must support temperature, which I am told is slated to take the form [a-b] -> [c] where [a-b] is a range of input temperature and [c] a fixed output temperature. This is clearly advantageous code-wise since I only have to monitor the input temperature on specific time interval for energy accounting, but then an assembler type needs energy to function so .energy would need to be modified to ensure no external energy is required, which brings us back full circle to the .energy problem. A third consideration is to keep the reactor a boiler type with an entity size of 3x3 and surrounds it with storage tank types such that the final composite entity is 7x7. This is needed so that burnable fuel can be added to the boiler via lua without those fuel being pulled out by inserter or long-handed inserters. This last method should future-proof the reactor since burning fuel is not a game property that will change any time soon. However the draw-back is this last method require me to create new assets and fiddle with sprite layout, which is not something I like to do but might have to bite-the-bullet.
   2. Initially, the reactor will have a GUI with an on/off button. The On button allows codes for that reactor to start running. When "on," reactor will only become "active" and starts to generate heat from a "inactive-cold" start if there are enough neutron sources within its core-fuel internal inventory. A reactor needs a minimum of 1:16 neutron sources:fuel-assembly, to become active. The core-fuel internal inventory can hold a total of 256 entries. In-game, the neutron sources will initially be made by proton spallation of depleted uranium pellets to transform some of it into Pu-239. This is then mixed with beryllium to form a primary neutron source that can be used to start reactors. Once reactors are running, one can "breed" secondary neutron sources from beryllium-antimony rods. In either case, primary/secondary neutron source will slowly be consumed and go to the hot-spent then cooled-spent internal inventories. Beryllium will come from betrandite found in fluorite ore while the antimony will come from stibnite found in iron ore.
   3. Once the reactor is "active," it can be turned "off." The reactor is first marked "inactive-hot" where the decay code will not run.
      • For a PWR type, the core is still hot for some time due to residual fission events so the reactor primary-coolant loop will cool by dumping heat into the spent-fuel-pool for about 5 minutes. At any time during this duration, the reactor can be restarted without the presence of the minimum ratio of primary/secondary neutron sources to fuel assembly being present. Once primary-coolant loop temperature is < 50 degree and 5 minutes has passed, each entry within core-fuel inventory will cycled through hot-spent then cooled-spent inventories and ultimately ejected into the reactor-chest to be removed by the player and dealt with through fuel-reprocessing mechanics. Once the hot-spent, cooled-spent, and core-fuel internal inventories are completely empty and the primary-coolant loop temperature is < 50 degree, the reactor will become "inactive-cold."
      • For a MSR type, the core is still hot for some time due to residual fission events so the reactor primary-coolant loop will cool by dumping heat into the secondary loop for about 5 minutes. At any time during this duration, the reactor can be restarted without the presence of the minimum ratio of primary/secondary neutron sources to fuel assembly being present. After 5 minutes has passed, the primary-coolant will cycled through integral-spent-fuel-processor and be dealt with through fuel-reprocessing mechanics. Once the primary-coolant have been scrubbed and emptied from the reactor, the reactor will become "inactive-cold."
   4. Reactor and its auxiliary buildings can not be mined once the reactor is "active." Auxillary buildings are reactor-recirculation-pump, reactor-steam-generators, spent-fuel-pool, integral-spent-fuel-processor, integral-fissile-processor, auxiliary-reactor, and reactor-chest. For any of these things to be mineable, the reactor must be "inactive-cold."
   5. PWR needs a spent-fuel-pool, essentially a storage tank, to function. This spent-fuel-pool should have water, for your sake. When you add fuel to the reactor-chest, it will be removed and added to the internal inventory of the reactor. I do decay calculation on this internal inventory. When a fuel is "spent" it will be moved to the hot-spent, another internal inventory. Water in the spent-fuel-pool will start to heat up and once it reaches 100 degree, water will start to "boil", i.e. disappears, and when there is no more water, the spent-fuel-pool will start to take hp damage. If the damage is severe enough, then the reactor will shutdown and cease to work. Entities around this reactor, including you if you are close enough, and the reactor itself will take damage. You must repair things to 100% before the reactor will work again. Thus for your sake, please keep the spent-fuel-pool at a reasonable temperature. Once spent fuel has spent enough time in the hot-spent inventory, it will be moved to the cooled-spent inventory and wait there until reactor-chest has room to accommodate the spent fuel.
   6. MSR needs the integral-spent-fuel-processor to function. Neutron poisons will slowly builds in the primary-coolant loop and must be scrubbed or the heat production will slowly dwindle. There is no way to thermally damage this sort of reactor since the fission events is well regulated by the characteristics of the molten salt such that the primary-coolant never exceeds certain temperature regime.
   7. Reactor and auxiliary buildings will need "maintenance." This will take the form of periodic percentage hp reduction. I'm looking at a heat production based scaling so the more heat the reactor produces, the more hp% will be reduced periodically. Obviously you combat this by providing construction robots with repair packs. If the reactor hp is 0%, it will blow up and destroy all the auxiliary buildings and any entities within a 10 tiles radius around the reactor. It will leave behind an indestructible and unminable rubble that will continue to damage anything within 10 tiles every second. For now, I will make it in-game non-removable until I figure out a nice in-game mechanic to redeem yourself.
   8. I will remove the 72 MW and 144 MW reactor and replace with two types of reactor capable of producing 1500 MW of heat. This can be "enhanced" by placing an auxiliary-reactor adjacent to the main reactor to add another 1500 MW of heat for a total of 3000 MW of heat. Going with just the rankine heat cycle, this should come out to around 1050 MW of electricity. This means for "most" people, they will only need one, maybe two, reactor(s) unless they build mega-bases.
      • PWR's heat production is based on type and number of inserted fuel assemblies.
      • MSR's heat production is based on ratio of dissolved fissionable material to neutron poisons.
3. Spent fuel reprocessing and breeding:
   1. For PWR, the spent fuel is put into a spent-fuel-processor, a special chest that opens the fuel assembly and separates the cladding material from the spent pellets. The amount of spent pellets recovered is dependent on the original enrichment level of the fuel assembly. The spent pellets will go through PUREX to recover U's and Pu's. The raffinate of PUREX will undergo SANEX to recover actinides, separate lanthanides, and remove neutron poisons. The recovered actinides, U's, and Pu's will be mixed with depleted uranium and fresh 4.7% U-235 to make MOX fuel. Most of the recovered actinides will need to be burned in a MSR. The lanthanides and neutron poisons will be converted into glass and stored as nuclear waste.
   2. For MSR, there is no "spent fuel" since the primary-coolant, which contains the fuel, is continuously scrubbed for lanthanides and neutron poisons by the integral-spent-fuel-processor and additional fuel added at the same time. This reactor auxiliary building will excrete lanthanides and neutron poisons that you will need to turn into glass to be stored as nuclear waste.
   3. No special treatment or storage option for the nuclear waste at the moment. Eventually, I want to make a nuclear transmuter to deal with the waste and turn it into something useful.
   4. Breeding will be taken care of by a special auxiliary reactor building call the integral-fissile-processor. This can only be added to the MSR, which takes the place of the auxiliary reactor. Thus "breeding" MSR will cap out at 1500 MW of heat. The integral-fissile-processor will strain out Pu's for incorporation into MOX to be burned in PWR.

I think that sums up what I have planned and is working on for the next version.

[dog_365]

tanks for the information now i can't wait for 0.7

[PhasmaNL]

Really looking forward to the next release!

[Thrall]

Thank you very much for this awesome mod. i always hated the need to build thousands of solar panels or pollute the world with steam boilers, so this is exactly what i needed!

Works also very fine with the Air Filtering mod, because the Air Filter machines use crazy amounts of power...



Thumbs up. Even more if u really make it more powerful. Cause a setup like above should really be able to power a whole base!

[Fatmice]

I'm glad you are enjoying the mod. You should know each steam-generator will only support one 30 MW generator. So what you're doing is okay, but you might have trouble during peak power usage.

And I agree, the setup above should be able to power much more. 3GW is not out of the question.

[Thrall]

ah ok, i was thinking 72 mw with slight decay should be able to power more then one generator. in fact it works quite good in this 3 to 4 ratio but i havent peaked it out for very long time, so it might collaps at some time (as it did with a 1/2 or 2/3 ratio before ) so i will use them 1/1 in the future.

for your future plans, i could imagine a early game version powering steam engines which can generate normal / high rates of power for the cost of lots of steam engines and also space.

and an endgame version which should be much more expensive then now (more processing units etc.) which can generate power to support pretty much every base, but doent take the crazy amount of space that you require in vanilla game. maybe not in the gw sector but something like 200 - 250 mw per generator would do, so that you can get up to 1gw with a power plant like shown above.

but as i sayed, i very much like your mod and the complexity it brings to the games power management. i played so many hours of factorio before and after the steam release, but the power management always was disappointing because you dont have any alternative to 1.) 100000000 solar panels with the size of the soviet union or 2.) crazy amounts of coal or solid fuel polluting everything...

your mod should be vanilla at some point in my opinion

[Fatmice]

Currently, I am planning each reactor to output up to 3000 MW-heat. Each steam-generator should be able to support up to 4 turbine-generators.

3000 MW-heat -> steam-generator (90%) -> 2700 MW-heat-steam -> turbine-generator (40%) -> 1080 MW-electric => Overall efficiency = 36%. Thus each turbine-generator is 250 MW-electric.

So up to 3000 MW-heat means exactly that. You need to insert a sizable number of fuel-assemblies and must reprocess them all the time to support this. Gone will be the days of inserting fuel assemblies and forget about the reactor.

This means to support 3GW, you will need at least 12 turbine-generators, 3 reactors, and a crap-load of fuel assemblies that must be constantly reprocessed...Not to mention, your reactor must be constantly repaired due to structural decay. So you will also need a good supply of repair kits.

[Requia]

What sort of value are you putting in per unit? I only get 30kg of yellowcake per hour at 1GWe here: http://www.wise-uranium.org/nfcc.html

[Thrall]

Currently, I am planning each reactor to output up to 3000 MW-heat. Each steam-generator should be able to support up to 4 turbine-generators.

3000 MW-heat -> steam-generator (90%) -> 2700 MW-heat-steam -> turbine-generator (40%) -> 1080 MW-electric => Overall efficiency = 36%. Thus each turbine-generator is 250 MW-electric.

So up to 3000 MW-heat means exactly that. You need to insert a sizable number of fuel-assemblies and must reprocess them all the time to support this. Gone will be the days of inserting fuel assemblies and forget about the reactor.

This means to support 3GW, you will need at least 12 turbine-generators, 3 reactors, and a crap-load of fuel assemblies that must be constantly reprocessed...Not to mention, your reactor must be constantly repaired due to structural decay. So you will also need a good supply of repair kits.

sounds amazing.

[Fatmice]

What sort of value are you putting in per unit? I only get 30kg of yellowcake per hour at 1GWe here: http://www.wise-uranium.org/nfcc.html

I don't know what you mean?
For the sake of game play, a fuel assembly will be ejected to the cooling pond when its life decreased to 95%. Regardless of type, a fuel assembly is 0.5 tons of uranium. The type determines the energy density, whatever that is. Using only 4.7% fuel assemblies, roughly 1/4 of the 256 assemblies will be ejected every 2700 GJ, each at around 95% of their health. Thus for 4.7% fuel assembly, each % is roughly 8.4375 GJ. This is an estimate, not an exact number, I will make it varies. So you can convert to energy/ton of U-235 => 8.4375GJ/(0.5 ton x 0.047 x 0.05) = 7181 GJ / ton of U-235.

If you solve the linear algebra for the enrichment cascade, you will find that for every unit of uraninite, 5/18 becomes 4.7% U235 pellets while 13/18 becomes 0.2% U235 pellets. So 54/5 uraninites is 3x4.7% U235 pellets or 1x4.7% U235 fuel assembly. Therefore, if you do not reprocess fuel, each unit of uraninite when processed to 4.7% U235 pellets will give you 8.4375GJ/(54/5) = 781.25MJ per uraninite.

[Requia]

What I mean is that you shouldn't need constant processing for any plants at the time scales involved. And your value is indeed very short. The real world value of the fuel assemblies (not the U-235 in total, the assembly without reprocessing). Is 28 - 38x10^6 GJ/t depending on reactor.

The claim can be made that 'days' are short here, but that's not reflected in the vanilla fuel (8MJ is about 1/3 to 1/4 kilo of coal depending on quality).

[Fatmice]

What I mean is that you shouldn't need constant processing for any plants at the time scales involved. And your value is indeed very short. The real world value of the fuel assemblies (not the U-235 in total, the assembly without reprocessing). Is 28 - 38x10^6 GJ/t depending on reactor.

The claim can be made that 'days' are short here, but that's not reflected in the vanilla fuel (8MJ is about 1/3 to 1/4 kilo of coal depending on quality).

I know. But this is a game, not the real world. That is why I said for the sake of game play. In fact, were it to follow "real" values, there would hardly be any fuel decay at all and no reason for reprocessing. Yet, people want fuel decay on the time scale that can be felt. Thus something has to give. How much energy should have been liberated when 5% of the fuel has been "burnt," and how much time did it stayed in the reactor?

Also, 28-38e6 GJ/t is for what % of burnup? Typically burnup are now 55000 MWday/t for once through fuel.

The numbers for me would be
(3000 MW x 1/4 x 1/24 day) / (0.5 ton/assembly x 64 assemblies x 4.7%-U235 x 5% burnt) = 416 MWday/t
For the above to be closer to 55000 MWday/t, either the assemblies has to come down in numbers or the time has to increase. Another word,
(3000 MW x 1/4 x 1/24 day) / (0.5 ton/assembly x 0.5 assembly x 4.7%-U235 x 5% burnt) = 53191 MWday/t
(3000 MW x 1/2 x 1/24 day) / (0.5 ton/assembly x 1 assembly x 4.7%-U235 x 5% burnt) = 53191 MWday/t

Reprocessing one fuel assembly every half hour seems too low for something fun to automate...or is it just right?

Regarding vanilla fuel, that is not a valid counter. The fuel values are simply tokens for boilers to run. Indeed, "energy" in this game is simply tokens.

[Requia]

The flipside is using that volume of ore, I get 8-20kg per barrel of Yellowcake depending on the type of coal I plug in and assuming a mid grade Uranite. 1/30th that above value isn't unreasonable if you're assuming that your fuel assemblies are .5t.