Nuclear Power from a Nuclear Engineer

[ssilk]

I see this idea all over the place. While it has SOME real world counterpart, like, 60 years ago, it just doesn't apply today. Modern reactors burn just about everything and THEN some. New reactors today can burn the waste from the old reactors. The whole idea is a relic of the ancient world.

But it is still not useful to put the stuff into your Morning-Müsli.

According to this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor

Nuclear waste that remains radioactive for a few centuries instead of millennia

Some centuries is still a long time.

In game, there are no good mechanics to deal with item waste. You can't just pile it up forever. It's no fun to force players to run 2 miles out, clearing biters, just to plant a thousand chests and then shotgun them. If you process the waste into useful material, then it's just another part of the production chain and requires no real storage.

I just want to add this: viewtopic.php?f=80&t=21278 Recycling/Disassembling of Waste / Scrap / Trash
which makes in conjunction to nuclear power much sense to read some of the linked threads.

[FasterJump]

I've read the first page of the thread.

I love:
-Sulfuric acid in the Mining Drill to mine uranium
-The nuclear plant heat water (could have several cold water input and several hot water/steam output) (would be nice to have a dedicated steam machine, with a high throughput, and it could even be an annex to the nuclear plant)

I like:
-Enrichment: why not
-Waste would be a great thing, but what if I put the waste in a chect and destroy the chest? would be too easy... [Edit: items contained in a destroyed chest could spread on the ground, and you could implement an annihilator machine that destroy items while generating pollution (for any items except nuclear waste)]
Or maybe we don't need nuclear waste in the game.

I don't like:
-Nuclear plants have an upkeep duration
-Nuclear plants have a fixed output, and explode if the energy consumption is not high enough
-Nuclear plants need a temperature between 85°C and 95°C or so

Last thing:
-The fusion reactor in the modular armor should be renamed something like: "Alien mobile energy generator", or anything but fusion. (a fusion device needs deuterium and tritium, the modular armor has no input...)

[bobucles]

Some centuries is still a long time.

If you're looking for realism, it would take about 20 years to build up enough toxic waste to even CONSIDER worrying over waste disposal.

[FasterJump]

If you're looking for realism, it would take about 20 years to build up enough toxic waste to even CONSIDER worrying over waste disposal.

I disagree for 3 reasons:
-Toxic waste doesn't start to appears after 20 years, it starts to appears as soon as the reactor consume uranium.
-IRL you need 20 years to build a rocket.
-Game time is much faster than real time.

[afk2minute]

My suggestion will actually be a simple "boiler type" plant that can be build very fast - without blue science, about the same time player can build solar system with accumulators..
It will need highly enriched fuel, have better output than steam boilers.
That will familiarize player with nuclear power, and prevent(if he want to bother with enrichment) him of building ugly solar power farms.
The waste from this reactor can be stored in special storage (that prevents pollution). It can be further refactored into fuel for more advanced reactor that has little to no waste.
More advanced reactor will provide more power, but is more complex (but should have the same principles of operation that the first one has) and more fuel-efficient (can take less enriched fuel and refactored waste from the first reactor as a fuel) and has really almost no waste (and this waste can be converted into something useful, or this waste "decays" overtime into some "safe" waste which can be just burned away in some building).
Output should be really high, i think of 200-300 MW of energy per plant. (first reactor, obviously should have like 5-10 MW). Second "advanced" reactor should be gated by some purple science research i guess so you actually will use that simple reactor (or build a ugly solar plant, you have a choice).

Reactor system should punish player by having really dramatic change of power from lack of fuel\coolant etc. If its full of fuel at 50% it will provide not 50% of power but 10% (for example). Not enough coolant - full shutdown of plant until flow is restored and you manually press the restart button (think of emergency automatic shutdown)/Punishment for those who want compact power and cannot provide sufficient resources. This rewards careful players with a good amount of power in small area and punishes those who are not. (alot of effort = alot of result). I dont like idea of explosions and meltdowns at all, no chemical plant or factory or something else explodes just because its inputs are wrong or it cant dump say sulfuric acid to pipe. Thats the game design and i want developers to follow it, i like it. That will also teach players some tricks like separate grid of power for enrichment chains - use steam or solar for enrichment chain and pumps so u have no feedback loop and your system is more reliable(i like idea of separating grids and different purposes of different plants and will talk alot about it probably).


For the fuel mining\enrichment it can be anything but not too complex, drill it, mine with acid, actually this doesnt matter. Until its overcomplicated its all fine.

I hope you can understand my english.

[bobucles]

-IRL you need 20 years to build a rocket.

Holy bejebbus since WHEN? The vast majority of effort goes into R&D because we have no actual backups in orbit and everything has to be 125% reliable. Beyond that we can crap out a grade B rocket in a few years easy.

Reactor system should punish player by having really dramatic change of power from lack of fuel\coolant etc. If its full of fuel at 50% it will provide not 50% of power but 10% (for example). Not enough coolant - full shutdown of plant until flow is restored and you manually press the restart button (think of emergency automatic shutdown)/Punishment for those who want compact power and cannot provide sufficient resources. This rewards careful players with a good amount of power in small area and punishes those who are not. (alot of effort = alot of result).

I doubt this kind of system will ever cause anyone problems. Once you have the production chains figured out, any reactor will always have enough of all the things it needs. There won't be a "not enough coolant" or "not enough fuel" problem until the ore extractors themselves run dry. At that point you just have a "better energy plant" with no real downsides.

I don't think placing the burden on production chains is going to work as a long term challenge. Everyone learns the production chain eventually, then the rest is cake. I guess that's okay for some, but it's not a great idea to make a system that is both easy to use and incredibly rewarding at the same time.

[afk2minute]

-IRL you need 20 years to build a rocket.

Holy bejebbus since WHEN? The vast majority of effort goes into R&D because we have no actual backups in orbit and everything has to be 125% reliable. Beyond that we can crap out a grade B rocket in a few years easy.

Reactor system should punish player by having really dramatic change of power from lack of fuel\coolant etc. If its full of fuel at 50% it will provide not 50% of power but 10% (for example). Not enough coolant - full shutdown of plant until flow is restored and you manually press the restart button (think of emergency automatic shutdown)/Punishment for those who want compact power and cannot provide sufficient resources. This rewards careful players with a good amount of power in small area and punishes those who are not. (alot of effort = alot of result).

I doubt this kind of system will ever cause anyone problems. Once you have the production chains figured out, any reactor will always have enough of all the things it needs. There won't be a "not enough coolant" or "not enough fuel" problem until the ore extractors themselves run dry. At that point you just have a "better energy plant" with no real downsides.

I don't think placing the burden on production chains is going to work as a long term challenge. Everyone learns the production chain eventually, then the rest is cake. I guess that's okay for some, but it's not a great idea to make a system that is both easy to use and incredibly rewarding at the same time.

If you will make system that is not rewarding nobody will use it as we have low effort\high reward solar panels. (to make nuclear plants exist you need to overcome solar panels in reward or in effort, or in both but that should not be the case).

Nothing in factorio is a long term challenge now. At least in vanilla game. Maybe something like sending 1 rocket per minute is challenge but it comes more to your patience and how your computer can handle game.
And that can be said about anything in the game. "once tricks with curcuits (in case you need some curcuit control for it) will be found that will be easy to setup and high rewarding without any problem".
Dont forget - you are not new to the game, for you almost nothing is challenge. Maybe some really hard curcuit network are challenging, but those are more for fun, not actual goal of the game (sending rockets asap).

For additional challenge we can make reactor polluting so it attracts biters. Or make reactor not polluting but just attracting biters alot. Evo factor stays the same, but you need to protect it really well against concentrated attacks of enemy. Make reactor priority target for them, make reactor have low health, when it gets destroyed or damaged it pollutes ALOT skyrocketing evolution factor (maybe even some special event like if reactor gets destroyed aliens immiadiatly expand their bases).
Have you any better ideas that can work out as a punishment for not properly handling reactor? And what exactly is not "properly handling". Your suggestion with the need of extra steam or solar (alot of it actually) will just lead to the situation where player can just build some more solar and dump reactors. And i would like to see some 85% power = nuclear, 13 percent = steam, 2% = solar. Thats the ratio i would like to see in my game actually (or someething like that but you got the idea).

Leave all complex things to mod like bobs mod imo and leave vanila a quite simple game compared to that imo.

[Fushigidane]

I see this idea all over the place. While it has SOME real world counterpart, like, 60 years ago, it just doesn't apply today. Modern reactors burn just about everything and THEN some. New reactors today can burn the waste from the old reactors. The whole idea is a relic of the ancient world.

LOL, it sounds like you're talking about genIV which is still at the experimental stage and will be for a long period of time. Also they don't burn all waste, they just turn the actinides that stay dangerous 100k years into fission products that stay dangerous for 1k years. It's still necessary to store it somewhere you just don't need to design a waste storage that will last 100k years.

[bobucles]

It's not just about the quality of waste that comes from a tractor. The efficiency also goes through the roof, letting less fuel do WAY more. That obviously means less waste.

Also it's the future and in space, so gen IV is a thing of the past. The worst case scenario is that waste fuel gets re processed with some raw material into new fuel. There never HAS to be any stored junk.

Instead of saying we need junk items, try to find a reason and place for useless inventory crap to exist. I cant.

[afk2minute]

For all those who want waste as a junk - remember - no factorio assembly machine leaves waste.
Have you ever been to gear factory for example? It leaves alot of waste actually (which is refactored then). Or any other REAL factory. It has waste (which is sometimes refactored, sometimes not).

There is no need to break game design at all. Or there should be HUGE reasons to do that. Are theere any? I think not.

[mr_loanid]

After reading the thread i got kinda mix between the ideas of BeCurieUs an Solyx:

1. Resource gathering

I quite like the idea of BeCurieUs where you mine the uranium powder with acid which makes uran mining outposts little more interesting cause you need to bring the acid.

2. Resource refinement

I like the point of Solyx that you need time to prepare the fuel so i would use the idea of an uranium power mod that i played i would use an array of Assembler/Centrifuges with recipes like "4 powder grade1 + water -> 3 powder grade0 (depleted) + 1 powder grad2" with a time like 10 sec and 4-5 Steps of refinement and as last step packing to cores. So player has the choice between time intensive or space intensive.

3. Reactor

As for the Reactor i would like different running modes (recipes) for the best 2-3 Grades an an Breeder recipe with the best Grade.
The Reactor should have an heat up phase and a cool down phase both around half a day long.
For running cost/waste the reactor would need additional concrete for an confinement which is outputted as waste and can be recycled to stone an small amounts of grade1 and grade0 uran
z.B.: "1 Grade5 Core + 1 Stack Concrete -> 1 Stack Waste Confinement + 1 Grade3 Core"
Also the reactor would always run at full speed, and need 2 pipes of water for cooling and has 4 output streams 2 prioritize for energy generation of super heated water for 1 steam turbines a 100 MW and 2 slightly cooler ones for excess heat where the player need to hook up cooling towers, if the player doesnt use at least 10-15% energy produces the reactor heats its self which will cause an alert like construction material and if not corrected the reactor shutdown and only waste is outputted.

Still need to do the exact number crunching.

PS. I hope the text is understandable my English is pretty bad

[BlakeMW]

I would not like to see pollution as a downside of nuclear. Nuclear power needs to be (mostly) clean in order to compete with solar and coal. From a gameplay perspectives the requirements for nuclear to make sense are basically:

Code: Select all

Type    | Upfront Costs | Fuel Costs | Pollution | Complexity | Space
————————|———————————————|————————————|———————————|————————————|———————
Coal    |   very low    |  moderate  | high      |  low       | Low
Solar   |   very high   |  none      | none      |  very low  | High
Nuclear |   moderate    |  low       | very low  |  high      | Low

Nuclear should be clean and strike a balance between lower upfront costs than solar and lower fuel costs than coal. The primary drawback should be complexity. Another downside is it should also be treated as a primary power source like Solar, meaning the nuclear reactor can't scale back its heat output - I'm not saying it should explode from overheating, it should have a vent - but the fuel usage should be constant rather than scaling with demand. You would then ideally use either coal/oil power or accumulators for load balancing (but you could also overbuild nuclear and just accept fuel wastage)

[bobucles]

Keep in mind that a new energy system doesn't have to be added in isolation. There's nothing wrong with looking over steam and solar power and making sure they fit well into the new regime.

[Solyx]

[Koub] In fact these topics are really about very very similar subjects. Topics merged.

Honestly you should not have merged my post in there. Just because they both have the word 'Nuclear' in them, doesn't mean they need to have the same things discussed, or that discussing them both won't be counter-productive. The proposed mechanic by the creator of this post, and mine, are discussing two very different things. He wanted something realistic and multi-staged. I was proposing a breeding mechanic which emphasizes simplicity and just makes time the largest investment, and also potentially opens up a new resource ecosystem. Anybody considering both ideas in parallel will either dismiss one and ignore it, or try to merge them, and dull the good points of either design.

Also It also makes my post come off as rude and arrogant, since it entirely ignores the ideas of the original poster, and fails to comment on them at all save for a few sentences that - spliced into this context - looks like I'm insulting his ideas for its complexity.

It'd be nice to receive some warning before these things get merged.

[Fushigidane]

It's not just about the quality of waste that comes from a tractor. The efficiency also goes through the roof, letting less fuel do WAY more. That obviously means less waste.

Also it's the future and in space, so gen IV is a thing of the past. The worst case scenario is that waste fuel gets re processed with some raw material into new fuel. There never HAS to be any stored junk.

Instead of saying we need junk items, try to find a reason and place for useless inventory crap to exist. I cant.

The amount of radioactivity in the waste scales fairly linearly with energy production during the first 1000 years, pretty much nothing you can do about it.

As I wrote earlier it would probably work best if waste managment became a part of other production chains. If nuclear waste is skipped it would make much more sense with fusion instead.

[FasterJump]

For all those who want waste as a junk - remember - no factorio assembly machine leaves waste.
Have you ever been to gear factory for example? It leaves alot of waste actually (which is refactored then). Or any other REAL factory. It has waste (which is sometimes refactored, sometimes not).

There is no need to break game design at all. Or there should be HUGE reasons to do that. Are theere any? I think not.

This guy makes a point. Factorio is about exponential production, not about waste managment.

[Koub]

Well the waste could be recycled intofuel again through adequate processing. I'm not a specialist, but I know we use MOX nuclear plants in Europe, that are able to generate electricity with what's considered as waste, and I bellieve there are fast reactors that can burn a lot more things and leave far less waste. I also know that used plutonium can be reprocessed to become fuel for a nuclear plant again. There is no need nuclear implemented in Factorio is 100% accurate, but there is plenty of room for waste reprocessing/recycling mechanisms to kick in.

[bobucles]

The main reason to reprocess fuel is that it loses the critical mass needed to maintain 100% reactor output. At that point the reactor slowly but surely dips in energy generation until the fuel can be supplemented or replaced. There's still good stuff in the old fuel, but it just needs to be broken down and built into another full cell.

[BlakeMW]

Well the waste could be recycled intofuel again through adequate processing. I'm not a specialist, but I know we use MOX nuclear plants in Europe, that are able to generate electricity with what's considered as waste, and I bellieve there are fast reactors that can burn a lot more things and leave far less waste. I also know that used plutonium can be reprocessed to become fuel for a nuclear plant again. There is no need nuclear implemented in Factorio is 100% accurate, but there is plenty of room for waste reprocessing/recycling mechanisms to kick in.

If we think in terms of realism I think it'd be pure idiocy for Factorio guy to do waste reprocessing. If he has any survival sense he'd get a robot to dump spent fuel in the nearest lake. It's much easier to make fuel rods out of newly mined uranium because it's only minimally radioactive until it is put in the reactor, in contrast spent fuel is blazingly radioactive and incredibly hazardous to work with, in France it's left to cool down for 3 years before they start to reprocess it. Not only the radioactivity, it's also a soup of different isotopes that need to be separated rather than just a few isotopes in natural uranium.

But Factorio is about building outrageous things (hence, death trains), and I think that waste reprocessing would be great from a gameplay perspective, allowing Nuclear power to be a mainly self-contained power source which doesn't need to be constantly fed fresh fuel from the mines, helping it to compete with solar, and distinguishing it from coal. As such, for gameplay reasons I strongly favor waste reprocessing as a high tech addition to nuclear setups.

One thing I kind of would like is if carrying around spent fuel rods causes constant damage - you should have to automate reprocessing of waste fuel (or at least use a shielded power armor setup when carrying it). I do favor new and exciting ways to kill yourself.

[bobucles]

No need to poison the player to death. Picking up a hazardous item can just cause an injury effect and have the attempt fail. That means only containers and bots can handle the material.

Keeping it out of player hands means another puzzle to solve.